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THE HILLS OF HOME 




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THE HILLS OF 

HOME 

BY L. MACLEAN WATT 

WITH THE PENTLAND ESSAYS OF 

ROBERT LOUIS 
STEVENSON 

AN OLD SCOTCH GARDENER 
THE MANSE: A PASTORAL 
AND THE PENTLAND RISING 
TWELVE ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOUR 
BY ROBERT HOPE, A.R.S.A. 



NEW YORK: 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1914 



'^R^^^ 






Tut-nbull &f Spears, Printers, Edinburgh, Great Britain 



LIST OF CONTENTS 



THE HILLS OF HOME 






CHAPTER ONE page \S 


CHAPTER TWO . 










29 


CHAPTER THREE 












41 


CHAPTER FOUR . 












49 


CHAPTER FIVE . 












59 


CHAPTER SIX . 












87 


CHAPTER SEVEN 












lOI 


CHAPTER EIGHT 












115 


CHAPTER NINE . 












133 



PENTLAND ESSAYS 



I. A PASTORAL .... 






147 


II. AN OLD SCOTCH GARDENER 






167 


III. THE MANSE .... 






185 


IV. THE PENTLAND RISING 






203 


I. THE CAUSES OF THE REVOLT 






207 


II. THE BEGINNING . 






215 


III. THE MARCH OF THE REBELS 






223 


IV. RULLION GREEN 






235 


V. A RECORD OF BLOOD 






24s 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

Frotn pictures by 
ROBERT HOPE, A.R.S.A. 

Robert Louis Stevenson . . frontispiece 

SwANSTON Cottage .... pa^c i6 
"When years have come it casts a more 
endearing light upon the past." 

SwANSTON Village— Spring ... 32 
" Each new impression only deepens the 
sense of nationality and the desire of native 
places." 

From above Swanston Cottage ... 64 
"The sea-beholding city in the plain." 

Winter on the Pentlands .... 96 
"A bitter air that took you by the throat, 
unearthly harpings of the wind along the 
moors." 

Thatched Cottage — Swanston Village . 128 
"I think I owe my taste for that hill busi- 
ness rather to the art and interest of John 
Tod." 

John Tod 152 

" Had been all his days faithful to that 
curlew-scattering, sheep-collecting life." 

The Garden— Swanston Cottage . . 168 
"In flowers his taste was old-fashioned 
and catholic." 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

The Manse . . ... page 184 

"A certain water-door, embosomed in 
shrubbery." 

CoLiNTON — Old Mill 200 

"The river is there dammed back for the 
service of the old flour-mill." 

RuLLiON Green 216 

"On the summit of the bare heathery spur 
of the Pentlands." 

The Pentlands, near Rullion Green . 248 
"In sooth that scene was fair." 



NOTE 

The Three Essays, "Pastoral," "An Old 
Scotch Gardener," and "The Manse," 
contained in this volume, are reprinted 
by arrangement with Messrs Chatto & 
Windus, Ltd. 



THE HILLS OF HOME 



THE HILLS OF HOME 
BY L. MACLEAN WATT 

CHAPTER ONE 

IT IS A THING WHICH CAN- 
not be understood by the dwellers 
in fertile plains — how hearts should 
ever learn to cling with love to the 
remembrance of frowning mountains, bare 
grey crags, and stormy headlands beaten 
about by the wind, and the rain, and the 
tumbling surf of the sea. Yet, that the 
thought of these does possess and domin- 
ate the lives of certain peoples with an 
abiding passion is testified alikeby history 
and by literature. 

All mountain folks have been patriots, 
because the mountains have been, in every 
age, the haven, the fortress, and bulwark 
of liberty. The very ruggedness of a land 
was an asset of its national independence. 
Hence the love men bear for their Father- 
land is naturally intensified in those last re- 
treats of most precious human interests. 
Indeed, battle for anything enhances its 
15 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

value in the eyes of those whohave to strug- 
gle for the possession of it. This undoubt- 
edly very largely explains thetenderpride 
which the Swiss and the Scots feel fortheir 
native mountains. The ranks of invading 
enemies have been rolled back down their 
slopes like spent waves. They vindicated 
their right to them in the blood of their 
race. 

"Scotia, my dear, my native soil" — that 
expresses the personal possession-right of 
a man to the land of his birth and upbring- 
ing, the prime result of his grapple for lib- 
erty. Retention, in spite of assault and 
violence, made each glen and hill, each 
hamlet and graveyard, very deeply prec- 
ious. Yet, up to modern times, the hills were 
largelyset about with fear and awe. In fact, 
in medieval and later Scotland a ridge, a 
ravine or a rushing stream was the border- 
limit of the possession of a clan, to cross 
which was to venture upon opposition, 
wrangle, and the risk of death. The advent 

i6 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

ofpeacefuldays,and the passing of ancient 
habits of language and life awoke, devel- 
oped, and deepened the spirit of romance. 
The genius and patriotism of Sir Walter 
Scott especially gave voice and meaning to 
this. Fading things were clothed with the 
glamour which dying gives to them, and 
men began to move lovingly amongst the 
glens.anddreambesidemeanderingburns. 
The crumblincr ruin on the crag- became a 
centre of poetic thought; the selfishness, 
oppression, cruelty, murder, and lust 
which had disgraced it being forgotten. 

Scotland can, from the very variety of 
her configuration and character, very freely 
meet the patriotic wants of all her varied 
people; for her landscape ranges from plain 
to crag, from silent moor to sobbing sea, 
fromdesolateupland to sunny harvest-field 
and placid lake. It is Fatherland! And that 
is a spell which has quickened tears even 
in strong men's hearts. I have known a 
handful of white sand, from the shore of a 
17 B 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

Highland loch four thousand miles away, 
treasured through three generations, from 
the morninglongagowhen the exiles turn- 
ed to take a final look at the lone waters 
that they loved. Years ago, an old High- 
lander, speaking to me, expressed in epi- 
gram this secret of Scotland and the Scot- 
tish nature, when he told me that what 
clasped his long life in a sweet complete- 
ness were his faith in God, and his being 
still in the place where he had been born. 
Religion and patriotism are undoubtedly 
the cords that bind us as a people. The 
nation that has within it thelove ofcountry 
and the love of God has the indomitable 
note of true and lasting life. This set at 
the back of all our strife the key of abiding 
victory. Men of our race were content to 
toil in windy fields, fighting, baffled often, 
onreluctanthillsides,coaxingcorn-patches 
out of rugged moors, because they loved 
their land, and because they believed that 
Godremembershonestlabour and rewards 

i8 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

the Struggle of true hearts. This is the fact 
behind that remembrance of native land 
which haunts the exile from the fields of 
home. He may forget. Softly as the silting 
sand that blows in from the desert, the dust 
of the years may settle between his heart 
and the home afar. But, ere he lies down 
to die, some voice, like the sound of a bell 
borne through the dark to a ship at sea, 
some verse of an oldsong his mother sang, 
will wake memory from her sleep. He will 
see again the old land of home — he will 
hear again the cry of the wind among the 
crags, and the voices of his own people call- 
ing to him, Come home to your own folks 
before you die! For a man cannot escape 
his race. A man cannot hush the call of the 
blood though he heaphimself around with 
comfortSjthough he win whatever the world 
can give him, though he bar the door ofhis 
heart against the dreams that visit him. Old 
memories draw the curtain. He sees aeain 
grey peaks against the sky, the scattered 
19 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

hamlet clinging above the shingly bay; 
and the salt spray of Hebridean seas is 
blown among his hair. There never was a 
true manyetbutfelt this to be true,remem- 
bering his lost youth, down behind the 
years. 

Now, through almost all the thoughts 
and words of Robert Louis Stevenson 
these truths run like an undertone. The 
story of his country's struggle for freedom 
and for faith impressed his heart deeply. 
Cosmopolitan though he became,he loved 
most of all the city of his birth, and though 
he loved all high places, yet most deeply 
spoke to him the environing hills of his 
childhood, "the hills of home," the wind 
among the trees on their lonely slopes, the 
voice of running waters in their wood- 
lands, the song of blackbirds and the 
rapture of the larks. 

The Pentland Hills, so accessible from 
the Edinburgh pavements, yet intimately 
known to comparatively fewof her citizens, 

20 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

appealed to Stevenson by their quiet, by 

their pensive dignity, by their historic 

and poetic associations, by their influence 

on the Hves of those whose acquaintance 

he made when he went to live beneath the 

shadow of Kirk Yetton, by the variety in 

the sunshine and cloud of their day-time, 

and by the spell of the thought of their 

loneliness in the night, vocal with the 

ghostly cry of restless wind and falling 

water. 

These feelings he expressed most 

charmingly in the verses, the second of 

which appeared in the dedication of his 

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: 

Bells upon the city are ringing in the night; 
High above the gardens are the houses full of light; 
On the heathy Pentlands is the curlew flying free; 
And the broom is blowing bonnie in the north 
countrie. 

We cannae break the bonds that God decreed to bind, 
Still we'll be the children of the heather and the wind; 
Far away from home, O, it's still for you and me 
That the broom is blowing bonnie in the north 

countrie! 
21 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

At the foot of the craggy face of Kirk 
Yetton shelters the little village of Swan- 
ston, a clachan "in the woody fold of a 
green hill," with some thatched cottages 
near by. Beside the burn, encircled by 
sweet trees, is Swanston Cottage, for ever 
associated with the remembrance of the 
delicate youth whose creative genius has 
written his name amongst the Scottish 
immortals, and at the same time has given 
him a grip on the affections of the world. 
The view from Kirk Yetton was very 
precious to him; and somewhere in the 
hollow of those hills Allan Ramsay set the 
ideal scene of his Gentle Shepherd, though 
more than one site has contended for the 
honour of being the poet's Habbies Howe. 
The vicinity of Carlops makes the strong- 
est claim, and thepoet's genius has created 
and coloured the geography of the neigh- 
bourhood, scattering it with "Patie's Hill" 
and "Patie's Mill," "Peggy's Lea" and 
"Jenny's Brae," &c. 

22 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

These Pentland **hills of home," so dear 
to Stevenson, are thus the real source of 
that interest in the lonely places and the 
lives remote in pastoral glens of Scotland 
which reached its climax in Sir Walter 
Scott, and through him became an integral 
part of Scottish thought. The pastoral 
landscape appealed to Ramsay. He did 
not incorporate in his picture anything of 
the sublime majesty of frowning precipice 
and misty corrie. His time was not yet 
ready for the appreciation of such things. 
But it had — almost without knowing it 
till Ramsay made it feel how wearisome it 
had become — grown tired of the garden 
convention which had come down as a bit 
of the poetic stage scenery from the older 
poets; and men, especially the jaded town 
folks, were glad to be led out into the 
green glades and sunny moorlands so 
near, yet for so long remote from their 
acquaintance. Besides giving an impetus 
to the literary expression of the charm of 
23 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

"the hills of home," Ramsay's work, in 
moving David Allan, in 1788, to depict 
the scenes of The Gentle Shepherd, awak- 
ened an art interest in native landscapes. 
Montgomerie, in the sixteenth century, 
had noted the charm of banks and braes, 
with the multitudinous life of undisturbed 
places; and very striking had been his 
pioneer view of wild Nature, especially in 
the rocky scaur, the rushing cascade, and 
the singing stream. But his was a picture 
of loneliness — Nature in solitude, except 
for the poet's responsive heart: 

As I mused mine alane, 
I saw ane river rin 

Out oure ane craggy rock of stane, 
Syne lighted in ane lin. 
With tumbling and rumbling 
Among the rockis round, 
Bewailing and falling 
Into that pit profound. 

To hear thae startling stremis clear, 
Methought it music to the ear. 

In Ramsay,however,thegentlermoods 

24 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

of the Pentlands, the purling stream sing- 
ing its song of Nature's childhood, the 
waterfall, the greensward, the folds of 
sheep, are viewed as the setting of innoc- 
ent pastoral life, and as things to be lov- 
ingly brought into intimate friendliest 
touch with human loves and aspirations 
of every-day existence and labour, the ele- 
ments and ingredients of primary poesy. 
He sees these things with a clean eye. 

Gae farer up the burn to Habbie's How, 

Where a' the sweets of spring and summer grow; 

Between twa birks, out o'er a little lin, 

The water fa's and makes a singin' din; 

A pool breast-deep beneath as clear as glass, 

Kisses with easy whirls the bord'ring grass. 

This was, of course, the fullest possible 
extent of acquaintance with such scenes 
that thedebonair townsman couldachieve. 
He was too corpulent, besides, to win ac- 
cess into the wilder solitudes, amid the 
mist-haunted grimnesses of frowning 
mountain recesses. 
25 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

Burns truly touched the characteristics of 

Ramsay's limitations when he wrote — 

In gowany glens thy burnie strays 
Where bonnie lasses bleach their claes; 
Or trots by hazelly shaws and braes 

Wi' hawthorns grey, 
Where blackbirds join the shepherd lays 

At close o' day. 

The influence of the Pentlands in liter- 
ature is therefore a recordable fact. 

There are other interests besides Ram- 
say's. The little village of Wester How- 
gate, in touch with the range, has an affec- 
tionate place in human memory through 
the exquisitely written tale, by Doctor 
John Brown, of Rab and His Friends. 
E very year, too, the anniversary of Rullion 
Green is celebrated by an open-air ser- 
vice, where thousands of people meet in 
huge conventicle. The old names them- 
selves have still an appeal within them. 
Windy Gowl, Cauldstane Slap — their 
very sound has an eerie sough. 

The hills are intersected by droveroads, 

26 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

nowlongsince forsaken by the great flocks 
of sheep creeping onwards to the Southern 
markets. Many an adventure occurred up- 
on these in the old droving days; robbery 
and murder sometimes invaded the quiet 
places. Gypsies, shepherds, and lonely 
men have had their adventures, unrecord- 
ed, deep in the quiet heart of those green 
hills. Judgment Day will see some strange 
uprisings there. 

It was natural, therefore, that this youth 
with the literary hunger in his heart, with 
eye and ear keenly open to the beauties 
of Nature and the experiences of men, 
should find much to interest and enthral 
him in such an environment. The natural 
exit for his thought in this connection was 
the Essay, and he used that form of utter- 
ance as a medium of word painting and 
portraiture, whereby the landscape of his 
childhood and hisyoungmanhood became 
re-peopled with the old minister, the old 
gardener, and the old shepherd, and with 
27 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

memories of the persecuted hill-folk, 
marching through the mist and the driv- 
ing hail to death for the faith 
of their fathers. 



CHAPTER TWO 

THE MODERN ESSAY, 
as a form of composition, 
sprang out of the Charact- 
er Sketch. The Character 
Sketch was too objective to meet the desire 
of expressing personal opinions, and it did 
not provide for desultory comment on af- 
fairs in general. Men in the sixteenth cen- 
tury were entering into thehabit of jotting 
down their opinions. A habit of keeping 
Common-place Books, wherein a man's 
thoughts became methodically arranged, 
led to the customof thinking on paper;and 
these things werecirculatedamongfriends. 
The name Essay was taken from Mon- 
taigne to cover the product. That word 
sufficiently expressed what the thing was 
meant for, namely, an informal attempt to- 
wards the utterance of thought. Itwas con- 
sidered tobe an avenue of personal opinion. 
In its pages the thinker spoke in the first 
person. It was even the convention to look 
29 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

Upon them as having been put together for 
the author's private use. Lord Bacon, by 
the pubHcation ofhisBssaj's in 1 597, estab- 
lished a model, for the English essayist, 
which has not been transcended. The Es- 
say remained for a while as a vehicle of 
worldly wisdom — a select gathering of 
notes and maxims; and gradually worked 
its way into recognition as an established 
branch of literature. Bacon set the mark of 
its style as an instrument of concise phrase 
and refined and polished thought, which 
he uses as the envelope of quotations and 
illustrations drawn from his own wide and 
varied reading in the Scriptures, in the 
classics, in Machiavelli and Montaigne; 
while all science, as known in his time, is 
utilized to elucidate his views on life. He 
looked upon his Bssaysin the light of their 
title, namely, as things which were not 
meant to be anything else but the passing 
expression of opinions, the spontaneous 
utterance of his own beliefs and thoughts. 

30 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

The Essay method was applied by Fell- 
tham, "a kind of Bacon in holy orders," to 
religious topics. Its utility was widely re- 
cognized, and it became an established 
medium of literary expression, evoking in 
modern times the most interesting utter- 
ance ofmen's most intimatethought. From 
its nature,therefore, it admitted of asmuch 
variety in utterance and point of view as 
there was human character behind the 
making of it. It may "perhaps be styled 
the sonnet of prose writing. . . Brevity be- 
ing its mark, it may be a vehicle of gentle 
humour, clean and polished wit, tabloided 
thought, and pregnant suggestion."* Sir 
Thomas Browne, Dryden, and Cowley 
used it with a masterly power. It was the 
genius of Addison and Steele, however, 
that, in The Spectator, fixed the Essay as 
a popular English literary form. A vast 
impetus was given to its cultivation, and 
Johnson's Rambler and Idler, along with 

* Literature and Life, by L. Mac Lean Watt. 
31 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

Goldsmith's Bee and Citizen of the World, 
bridged the gulf between the opalesques 
of Addison and Steele and the poignant 
humanity of Elia. Alexander Smith, the 
almost forgotten author oi A Life Di^ama, 
presented, in his Dreamthorp, his thoughts 
upon literature and life, in the form of care- 
fully polished and refined essay, using it 
as a vehicle of passing emotional impres- 
sions of humanity, manners, and emotions, 
characters and customs. In the hands of 
Macaulay, Arnold, and Carlyle it became 
a mediumof criticism, expressingtheauth- 
or's views on the principles of Art, and 
Literature, in fact almost the pamphlet of 
a reviewer. 

Of modern men none have come nearer 
to the earlier masterpieces in the art of the 
Essay than Robert Louis Stevenson. His 
essays were extremely personal, and, in 
this respect, indeed, excelled their kind, 
while they displayed intimate acquaint- 
ance with all that had gone before in the 

32 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

hands of the master-craftsmen. He knows 
the dialect of his trade, yet his own accent 
and his own point of view lift him above 
the imputationof plagiarism and imitation. 
His methods of work followed his ideals 
of writing. Agood thing has to grow slow- 
ly. It cannot be pushed, 

"Do you imagine," he says, in protest, 
to a kindly correspondent, "that I could 
write an essay a month, or promise an 
essay even every three months? . . . The 
essays must fall from me, essay by essay, 
as they ripen." They were to be the full 
fruitage of his soul, not the trivial expres- 
sion of a passing moment. 

Yet Stevenson's notion of what an essay 
was, expressed in his own words, did not 
rise quite so high as that, but as being 
contributions towards "a friendlier and 
more thoughtful wayoflooking about one. 
. . . You know my own description of my- 
self as a person with a poetic character 
and no poetic talent: just as my prose 
33 c 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

muse has all the ways of a poetic one, and 
I must take my Essays as they come to 
me." 

His psychological insight, unique in its 
depths of piercing and passionate vision, 
was an early possession of his own. As 
when, a mere child, he said to his mother, 
"Mamma, I have drawed a man. Shall I 
draw his soul now?" His sympathy, too, 
could speak with a touch that arrested the 
breath in one's throat, as when he tells 
how, in one of his nights of early ill-health, 
his mother lifted him up out of bed, and 
showed him two or three windows still lit- 
up in Queen Street, "where also, we told 
each other, there might be sick little boys 
and their nurses, waiting, like us, for the 
morning." 

He was deeply fond of history. Brave 
episodes of life and struggle appealed to 
the imaginative side of his nature. Especi- 
ally was he moved by the history of his 
country, in the dark days of the persecu- 

34 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

tion of the Presbyterian faith, that form of 
faith so suitable to "the hills of home," an 
amalgam of sternness and love, like the 
environing landscapes which were the 
theatre of its manifestations. Neverthe- 
less, he was catholic in the truest sense. 
His love for Edinburgh, and the combin- 
ation of meadow, woodland, and mountain 
in which it is set, was pathetically faithful 
and abiding, although she behaved to him 
like a step-mother. The same contradic- 
tions which appeared in most things that 
appealed to him, appeared also in this love 
of his for the ecclesiastical history of his 
country; for the sunshine of his nature, in 
combination with the Bohemianism of his 
character, made him revolt, at certain 
seasons, against hard dogmas in its creed. 
Besides, he would really have found the 
way to heaven wearisome walking contin- 
ually with the saints. The variety of the 
road in the other direction, with the com- 
pany therein, sometimes appealed to him 
35 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

with a freshness and a tang quite his own. 

His extreme impatience of convention 
led him, of course, to be greatly mis- 
understood, perhaps most of all by his 
own father, whose conventional ortho- 
doxy he declared to be something like a 
belief that "this life was a shambling sort 
of omnibus which was taking him to his 
hotel." To himself, the clockwork world 
seemed so ridiculous! It was a weariness 
"to see people skipping all round us, with 
their eyes sealed up with indifference, 
knowing nothing of the earth, or man, or 
woman, going automatically to offices, and 
they are happy or unhappy out of a sense 
of duty, I suppose, surely at least from 
no sense of happiness or unhappiness, 
unless perhaps they have a tooth that 
twinges. Is it not like a bad dream? Why 
don't they stamp their foot upon the 
ground and awake?" 

One can trace the seeking of his soul 
after some kind of spiritual rest, and find- 

36 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

ing it, not in dogmatic utterances, but in 
general conclusions. Sometimes one sus- 
pects that he is gropingafter faith to oblige 
his father, and to make the old man forget 
the bitter arguments they have shared on 
the subject. Still, one must feel him to be 
honest when he says: 

"Strange as it may seem to you, every- 
thing has been, in one way or the other, 
bringing me a little nearer to what I think 
you would like me to be. 'Tis a strange 
world, indeed, but there is a manifest God 
for those who care to look for Him." 

At the same moment his postscript ex- 
plains his position. The perverse pixie ac- 
knowledges his fault: 

"While I am writing gravely, let me say 
one word more. I have taken a step to- 
wards more intimate relations with you. 
But don't expect too much of me. Try to 
take me as I am. This is a rare moment, 
and I have profited by it; but take it as a 
rare moment. Usually I hate to speak of 

n 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

what I really feel, to that extent that when 
I find myself cornered, I have a tendency 
to say the reverse." 

He is beginning to see the fundamental 
earnestness of life, and he feels convinced 
that every man should leave a Bible be- 
hind him if he is unable to leave a jest 
book. "I feel fit to leave nothing but my 
benediction." He left it truly in his words 
that so often are like still music, in his 
look over the shadow-threshold of the 
Unseen, in some of his verse, haunting in 
its pathetic truth, and fruited melody, in 
the strength which out of his frequent 
weakness makes forthe upliftingof strong- 
er men, down, sometimes, on their faces, 
in sorrow or in failure, or in fruitless ques- 
tionings in the sawdust ring of the circus 
we call life. 

It is, indeed, much to talk with one who 
has gone through the campaign, lain strick- 
en in the trenches with bleeding wounds, 
and heard the onward-moving feet of the 

38 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

crowd passing above and around him. The 
load that irks our own shoulders; and the 
ache in our own hearts are uplifted and 
assuaged when we know how weaker and 
sadder men learned to endure, and to 
triumph and be strong. 



CHAPTER THREE 

THERE WAS SOME- 
thing brave in his writing, 
worthy of thf: h'ghthouse 
building stock to which he 
belonged. His grandfather had not fitted 
up the Bell-Rock lighthouse for nought. 
Hh father's moodishness gave colour to 
his child's feelings, and there was much 
in the memories of the Manse, in which 
some of his childhood was spent, beside 
the Water of Leith at Colinton, where his 
grandfather, old Doctor Balfour, so long 
ministered. Men might have chosen to-day 
another site, certainly not in the flat be- 
tween the parish graveyard and the river; 
but they could never have selected a more 
romantic or more poetic stance. Out of the 
bedroom windows the belfry, the home 
of white-winged pigeons, may be seen, 
under the shadow of which the fathers of 
the hamlet sleep; the dust of poor men and 
women creeping in close to the shelter of 
41 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

the great ones of the parish. The grave- 
yard of a place like that becomes the real 
"Who's Who" of the men who gave of 
their means, andthe men who gaveof their 
labour for the up-building of a community 
for God within sound of the running river 
singing seaward through the trees — a riv- 
er of mills, all speaking of honest industry, 
beating and pulsing with honest thought. 
The village has become now a place of 
villas, where the dry lungs of city folk may 
expand under the clean breath of the hills. 
In Stevenson's day it was a dreamy ham- 
let — the churchyard a veritable Garden 
of Sleep; while the long grasses, daisy- 
starred, were a fringe like a benediction 
between the faces of the dead and the star- 
ing eye of the world's day. The Manse 
plane is a dreamy hollow still. Under its 
windows the river flows, now fretted into 
passion music byboulders that obstruct its 
passage to the sea, now floating through 
soul-moving silences of great deep shad- 

42 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

owy pools. There are messages from the 
mountains in it for the children of the 
plains. To the imaginative boy the high 
bank of cliff and scaur, up which climb the 
wind-stirred trees, was as the border of 
the skies, yet with the imaginative tincture 
ofa world beyond touching its lofty margin 
of greenery. H is heart went back long pil- 
grimages out of manhood to that place 
of running waters, with whose song once 
mingled the evening psalm of the Coven- 
anters in the snow-covered kirkyard, on 
their last bivouac before death for the 
grimand stern faith that was drawingthem 
on to lonely Rullion Green. It must have 
seemed, and especially to a heart touched 
by the emotions of the ancient religion of 
the Hebrew shot through with the grey 
sunshine of Scottish skies, adwelling-place 
of God, in which 

The sparrow findeth out 
An house wherein to rest, 

The swallow also for herself 
Hath purchased a nest,— 

43 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

the flash of sunshine on the wings of doves 
being almost the token of angeHc pres- 
ences. 

That old place, secluded and remote, 
yet spoke of wide-world pilgrimages to 
him in whose heart was the call of the 
mystic flautist that plays always to the 
children of our race the captivating call, 
"Over the hills and far away!" For there 
were lines of communication from it to the 
ends of the world; and the heavy-footed 
post-carrier, in his coarse and common 
satchel, bore to and fro messages with 
strange foreign names. 

One finds this reflected as in a magic 
plate in his Essay on the Manse, wherein 
he passes a loving hand across the mirror 
of remembrance, his touch reviving pic- 
tures that are fading, and pictures that 
have been forgotten quite, love bringing 
to light a type of Scottish clergyman no 
longer moving now through Assemblies 
of the Church. There scarce can be to-day 

44 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

the kind of study like that wherein the old 
man sat. The library of a parson of to- 
day is different, with a wide world's dif- 
ferences, from that which was marshalled 
on the old man's shelves. Even the kindly 
grace, the dignity which was the peculiar 
property of a courtierofthe King of Kings, 
has given place to the preciseness of men 
of affairs, who have to run their parishes 
like business establishments. The day of 
quiet dreams is past for most Scottish 
manses. Shoe-leather, stair climbing, fin- 
ance, the face-to-face-ness of intimate ac- 
quaintance with social problems of the 
poor and the unclean, are in the forefront 
of the methods of the ecclesiastic of to-day. 
Parochial religion is as practical a thing 
as life and fire insurance. Not, of course, 
that it has lost the inspiring necessity of 
divine grace laid upon it from the begin- 
ning; but much of the simple sweetness of 
its externals has for ever passed away. 
Nevertheless, the old place between the 
45 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

running waters and the Garden of Sleep, 
which is as a deep still pool on this side 
of eternity, remains practically the same; 
and, to the heart of R. L. Stevenson, it al- 
ways remained as a holy nook of memory, 
whither recurred his soul's bestdreamings. 
Looking through the past, he loved to 
trace the residuum of inheritance which 
he had received into his own heart from 
the old minister — "a love of talk, a love 
of teaching, a love of nuts and port and 
porter." " I would rise," said he, "from the 
dead, to preach!" Though he could not 
tabulate all he felt, the presence of ancient 
influences "in the very knot and centre of 
his present life and experience" made him 
as though he kept step with the stride of 
the past; and the mixed blood of border 
fighter, of Jacobite smuggler, of deep-sea 
sailor, and of brave hearts that struggled 
in the salt foam to fix up guiding lights for 
mariners,gave a measure to the pulse-beat 
of his own, 

46 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

There is a great deal to be reckoned with 
in the rock from which we are hewn. It 
is difficuh to get one's feet clear of the 
entanglements of race which cling about 
our early years, and the stories of what 
men of our blood have done, whispered 
above us when we were little more than 
out of our cradles. The Scottish heart 
especially lingers among such things. 
They are the very last to be shaken off 
from its remembrance. The power of an- 
cestor-remembering is thehistory-making 
power in the Scottish folk-legend. It had 
a special appeal to the mind of Stevenson. 
The Essay on the Manse is full of it. The 
old place was to him a house of ghosts. 
The stairs creaked under steps that had 
a haunting familiarity in their footfall. 
Indeed, his heart was haunted, and the 
windows of it crowded with faces tantaliz- 
ingly reminiscent of family portraits hung 
in dusty rooms. 



CHAPTER FOUR 

THE INFLUENCE OF 
his ancestry, and the serious- 
mindedness of his parents 
very naturally turned his 
thought towards the entrancement of the 
Covenant. 

As the result of his reading on the 
matter of the religious persecutions in 
Scotland his Pent land Rising, A Page of 
History, 1666, was written, and was pub- 
lished anonymously as a small green 
pamphlet, issued by Andrew Elliot, Edin- 
burgh. H is imagination was deeply stirred 
by the sufferings of his countrymen, by 
their indomitable courage and fearless- 
ness in the face of death. He always loved 
the peasantry, and, with thatgenialinstinct 
of genius, was drawn by sympathy and 
admiration to the cause of the common 
people. His heart must have been moved 
to read of his namesake, John Stevenson 
of Cumreggan, one of the survivors of 
49 £> 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

Pentland, who wrote A Rare Soul- 
strengthening Cordial, and who, like all 
men that have passed through a soul- 
crisis, instinctively touched true style, as 
when he said, "Many a night have I lain 
with pleasure in the churchyard of Old 
Dailly, and made a grave my pillow." 

Wodrow, whose page was a pleasure 
to Stevenson, and yet also a weariness, 
with its footnotes, proclamations, and 
Acts of Parliament, recorded the shooting 
of another Stevenson, who was in a small 
company surprised at prayer in Minnigaff 
by the notorious Colonel James Douglas, 
Lieutenant Livingstone, and Cornet 
Douglas. 

There was much inthe Pentland episode 
to stir the imagination and catch the fancy. 
The Covenanters, goaded to a corporate 
protest, seven hundred people, roused at 
Dairy, marched on towards Edinburgh, 
under Wallace of Achans, an old cam- 
paigner of the Civil Wars, who had been 

50 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

Lieutenant-Colonel of the Foot Guards, 
and who, by constant drill and discipline, 
did his best upon the way to stiffen his 
peasant forces for the fight which he felt 
certain would be thrown across their path. 
A terrible storm lashed them as they 
moved over the wild country round 
Cumnock, but Wallace defied the storm, 
though it winnowed his ranks of some 
who were not weather-proof. Strong and 
resolute, however, he allowed nothing to 
hinder his march; and sheltered his rabble 
in St Bride's of Douglas, among the tombs 
of notable men of war. At Lanark they 
were one thousand strong, half of them 
mounted on rough farm horses. They 
pushed on by Bathgate, "through pitiable 
broken moores," not daring to lie down lest 
they should perish in the sleet, pressing 
forward, tied together lest they might fall 
out of the ranks in thedarkness andstorm. 
In Colinton churchyard, which lay cover- 
ed with frosted snow, they made their biv- 
51 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

ouac. Disturbed by the Edinburgh Fen- 
cibles, they took to the Pentlands, lofty 
and austere in the November morning, 
swinging round by Dreghorn Castle, 
Woodhouselee, and Inaliston Bridoe to 
Rullion Green, an ancient market stance 
on the south-east base of Turnhouse Hill, 
familiar to the drovers of the South, where 
many a ragged "rullion" had been gath- 
ered to the cattle trysts. Dalyell came on 
from Currie by the drove road between 
Capelaw and Bellshill, past Saint Cather- 
ine's Chapel, now hid beneath the Edin- 
burgh water reservoir. The experienced 
eye of Wallace selected this for his des- 
perate stand. A natural trench cut the old 
drove road, and overhead was the Turn- 
house Hill, fifteen hundred feet high. 
West and south the green slopes rolled 
to the foot of Carnethy, while on the north 
the ground dropped three hundred feet 
in half a mile, towards the Castlelaw 
Hill, where the Glencorse burn "dreams 

52 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

and pours in cunning wimples in that 

glen." 

The army of the Covenant had in it 

only sixty muskets, forty brace of pistols, 

and twenty pounds of loose powder, while 

Dalyell's three thousand were well-armed 

disciplined troops. A contemporary ballad 

scornfully recounts how 

"Some had halbards; some had durks; 
Some had crooked swords like Turks; 
Some had slings, and some had flails 
Knit with eel and oxen tails; 
Some had spears and some had pikes; 
Some had spades which delvyt dykes; 
Some had guns with rusty ratches; 
Some had firey peats for matches; 
Some had bows but wanted arrows; 
Some had pistols without marrows; 
Some the coulter of a plough; 
Some had scyths men and horse to hough; 
And some with a Lochaber axe 
Resolved to give Dalyell his paiks." 

A fight like that which ensued was 
fraught with imaginative power. It kindl- 
ed imagination even in the rough men 
who, havingpassed through this struggle, 
53 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

wrote their ill-spelled letters about their 
experience. Drummond, for example, writ- 
ing to Rothes, described the skirmish in 
a thumb-nail sketch. "They mixed," he 
says, "like chess-men in a bag." Rude 
though their weapons were, the hearts of 
the peasantry were pathetically staunch, 
and their scythes mounted on poles were 
terrible against the charges of the horse- 
men. 

There were figures among them that 
would stand out from the most prosaic 
page, sure to catch Stevenson's eye — men 
like Captain Paton of Meadowhead — 
whose trenchant blade, notched with its 
dour battle work, may still be seen — a 
veteran who had fought in comradeship 
with Dalyell himself in the German wars, 
and who had gone through Kilsyth, Phil- 
iphaugh and Worcester. He and Dalyell 
knew each other's fighting weight. As 
Paton cut down trooper after trooper sent 
to kill him, he grimly cried, ' ' Go home and 

54 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

tell your master I cannot come to sup with 
him to-night!" How Joab, the captain of 
David's host, would have loved a man 
like that! What a vindictive psalm he 
might have written. 

A great mass of the defeated peasantry- 
were captured and driven like cattle, to be 
penned like beasts in Greyfriars church- 
yard, in Edinburgh, while many found 
their last long bivouac on the green side 
of the Pentlands, where they had fought 
their final fight. "Next day," we are told, 
"the godly women of Edinburgh went out 
and buried in shrouds the dead who lay 
stricken on the bloody sward of Rullion 
Green." 

Stevenson was caught, very naturally, 
by the thought of those men who had left 
the farm and the plough, and, with the 
very implements of their labour, scythes 
and flails, went out to die for their faith. 
The quiet hills seemed to speak to him of 
their stern resolve. His soul had grown 
55 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

Up in the environment of a strongly Pres- 
byterian house; and the romantic chivalry 
of his nature responded to the self-forget- 
fulness of the brave peasantry and landed 
gentry who had felt their patriotism bound 
up thus with their religion. Stevenson, 
much to the joy of his father, toiled on this 
episode, but he made it into a story, a 
method which did not meet with the ap- 
proval of the domestic censor. He there- 
fore wrote the small green-covered pam- 
phlet; which, however, was soon after- 
wards bought in, as far as possible, by his 
father. 

The simple suffering devotion of the 
Covenanters clung to his sympathy. The 
graves of the martyrs, scattered every- 
where in quiet moors, in lonely places 
where they fell, gripped his fancy. When- 
ever he writes about them, his writing 
gains power by the spiritual transcript of 
the gaunt simplicity of the subject. Noth- 
ing needs to be added to lines like these: 

56 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

"We went up the stream a little further 
to where two Covenanters lie buried in an 
oakwood." The picture of an emotion 
stands therein clear and perfect. 

The appeal of the persecuted remnant 
held sway over him to the end; and it was 
far away from home, that home which he 
was never to behold again, that he wrote 
to S. R. Crockett the three touching ver- 
ses, instinct with pity for the outcast folk: 

Blows the wind to-day, and the sun and the rain are 
flying. 
Blows the wind on the moors to-day and now, 
Where about the graves of the martyrs the whaups 
are crying, 
My heart remembers how! 

Grey recumbent tombs of the dead in desert places, 
Standing stones on the vacant wine-red moor. 

Hills of sheep, and the homes of the silent vanished 
races. 
And winds, austere and pure: 

Be it granted me to behold you again in dying. 
Hills of home! and to hear again the call; 

Hear about the graves of the martyrs the peewees 
crying, 
And hear no more at all. 

57 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

It would be interesting to know how 
much of this was actually inspired by the 
lonely places which were the scenes of the 
struggles of the faithful, and which were 
the enfolding receptacle of their graves. 
The fact and its envelope made their ap- 
peal, often, together, to Stevenson's sens- 
itive mind. Undoubtedly the solitude 
which was the arena of the conflict and 
the sacrifice of those simple courageous 
bands deepened the piteousness of their 
story, emphasizing their bitter outcasting. 
The grey wilderness became vibrant, for 
him, with their appeal for the recognition 
of the stern and terrible justice 
of their cause. 



CHAPTER FIVE 

THE SCOTTISH MIND 
is indomitably moulded by 
the mountain, the desert and 
the sea, the three great influ- 
ences which make for deep things in the 
heart. It is manifest that that trinity ap- 
pealed immeasurably to Stevenson. 

Yet love of Nature, and the recognition 
of the appeal of Scottish landscape to the 
soul, came late in the day; in fact, it is the 
characteristic of the modern spirit of Scot- 
tish Literature. One need not be astonish- 
ed at that, if one remembers, alongside of 
it, the remarkable fact that, though we are 
a maritime race, it is only in modern times 
that even an anthology of sea poems could 
be compiled in our literature, which one 
would expect really to be full of sea-tangle 
and driftwood; while such a thingis impos- 
sible in connection with woodland and for- 
est verse. Montgomerie, Scott and Hume, 
it istrue.inthe sixteenth century sawbeau- 
59 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

ty in Nature; but not until Drummond of 
Hawthornden does that feeling find utter- 
ance in Scottish poetry again, and he pass- 
ed it on as a growing thing to Allan Ram- 
say. There was love of country,undoubted- 
ly,which sprang from the keenly awakened 
feeling for natural liberty; but the passion 
for the hills, the field and the stream, the 
communion with the spirit of the moun- 
tains, and the deep romantic love of lone- 
ly places, was essentially modern. A man 
loved the spot that gave him birth, the glen 
that sheltered him, or the town within 
whose walls his people had found protec- 
tion, the streets and lanes in whichhe play- 
ed with his earliest comrades;but,down till 
the eighteenth century, to thegeneral mass 
of the poets and the great body of the 
people, the vast wild lonely places were 
looked upon with something like terror, 
when not with absolute repulsion. Burt, in 
his letters from the North, spoke of the 
hills as grisly and ugly, and "especially so 

60 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

when the heather was in bloom! "The man 
whose genius changed all that, clothing 
even the ragged caterans with the colours 
of romance, was Sir Walter Scott, who, by 
accentuating the charm of native scenery, 
wrote the deeper on the patriotic heart of 
the people the love of native land. Never- 
theless, Drummond was unique in histime 
in discerning and expressing in his verse 
the still beauty of a lofty mountain cover- 
ed with snow, an exquisite feature of a 
Scottish landscape, to which, perhaps, he 
had been educated through his travels a- 
broad, when he had beheld the splendid 
colouring of the snow-crowned Alps. In 
this he was a pioneer. 

Robert Louis Stevenson was, in these 
respects, a worthy son of his race; and, 
while he was a true child of Edinburgh, 
lovingitsplainstones with a filial affection, 
yet, the glamour of the hills, and especially 
of those which were near his native city, 
held him overmasteringly. When, there- 
6i 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

fore, in 1867, his parents took a lease of 
Swanston Cottage, at the foot of Kirk Yet- 
ton, and he spent his time between Edin- 
burgh and Swanston, the influences and 
associations of green hill and grey rock, of 
misty peak and quiet and still places, took 
a large part in the moulding of his thought 
and of the form of its expression. 

Very early the love of Nature and of 
lonely places had possessed him, and led 
him away out of beaten tracks of conduct 
and of duty. He loved to play truant from 
school, and from the matter-of-fact dis- 
cipline of lessons. The voice of Spring 
especially would call to his willing heart — 
"Come with me over the hill so free, 
Where the winds are blowing, 
And the streams are flowing 
On to the shining sea." 

He was always for "Over the hills and 
far away," at the very first impulse. The 
strain of Nature sang to him the Song of 
the Open Road, and his heart leapt to its 
measure. 

62 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

It was a suitable education, indeed, for 
a child like him. His truant hours were 
charged with inspiration. Indeed, the best 
school for such a spirit was the free field, 
and Nature was his best professor. The 
air of open places got into the breath of his 
vocabulary, and gave a spacious dignity of 
its own to his style. And yet, along with the 
spontaneity which is the grace of genius 
he brought into the creation of that style 
which was the expression of himself, the 
grace of industry. The acquisition of the 
art of writing was with him a work of piety 
and of labour. Without his wanderings 
over Kirk Yetton, Allermuir, Cauldstane 
Slap and the rest, his mind would have 
missed the free stride of its utterance. The 
very names appealed to him; and he pass- 
ed on their glamour togenerations of read- 
ers. Nor would he have been brought in 
contact with the mind and character of 
men like John Tod the Herd, and Robert 
Young the Gardener. 
63 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

His college days were not remarkable 
for that close attendance on lectures and 
assiduous devotion to note-taking which 
usually mark out a student for the respect 
of his Professors. His contemporaries did 
not, indeed, gauge his qualities as a whole. 
Some fell short altogether. I have actually 
heard one who was with him in the Specu- 
lative Society say that some of them never 
really listened to any paper he wrote; and, 
far more clearly than his appearances in 
a discussion, recalled theoccasionon which 
he turned up driving a cab, which, because 
he was late, he had boldly seized on the 
stance, leaving the open-mouthed vocifer- 
ous cabman helplessly gazing after him. I 
do not know the name of the friend who 
was brave enough to drive the cab back, 
and leave it among the ruins of Jehu's voc- 
abulary. His was surely the bolder half of 
the adventure. 

While the sound of the sea, and the 
glamour of the hills everywhere appealed 

64 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

to his Scottish heart, men appealed to 
him also, through the same mental chan- 
nel. Knox, "strong, salient, and worthy," 
Scoto-Hebraic, religio-political prophet 
and pioneer of so much that is great in his 
native land, especially in educational or- 
ganization; Hume and Burns, with Scott, 
" the ever delightful man sane, courage- 
ous, admirable," as he designated him, 
these were shadows that spoke to him 
strongly out of the past. 

It is interesting to see how Nature im- 
pressed him through channels of native in- 
fluence, wherein religion, like a ghost, nev- 
er far away from the heels of any Scots- 
man, coloured his view; as when he wrote 
from Wick of the storm he beheld there, 
in which the spray rose eighty feet above 
the new pier. "I stood a long while on 
the cope watching the sea below me. . . . 
I hear its dull monotonous roar at this 
moment below the shrieking of the wind, 
and there came ever recurring to my mind 
65 E 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

the verse I am so fond of — 

'But yet the Lord that is on high 

Is more of might by far 
Than noise of many waters is 

Or great sea billows are.' " 

Edinburgh, of course, spoke to him 
with power equal, perhaps, to that of the 
hills. That fair city — about which every- 
thing that is good has been said, fre- 
quently so badly because no words can 
express the charm, material and spiritual, 
of the grey Scottish capital, with the peak 
of Arthur's Seat looking down the alleys, 
watching the crowded houses; with the 
cry of the bugles at the castle; and the 
power of that poem in stone-and-lime up 
on the moss-grown rock, the throne of 
kings of old — held his heart until the end. 
Its appeal is, of course, unique, with its 
view of the Forth, and the H ighland hills, 
from its very streets. 

"After all," he writes, "new countries, 
sun, music, and all the rest, can never take 

66 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

down our gusty, rainy, smoky, grim old 
city out of the first place that it has been 
making for itself in the bottom of my soul, 
by all pleasant and hard things that have 
befallen me for these past twenty years or 
so. My heart is buried there — say, in 
Advocate's Close!" 

And once more he writes — 

"Hearkening I heard again 
In my precipitous city, beaten bells 
Winnow the keen sea wind." 

He had the memorizing eye of the art- 
ist, which carries away in one glance all 
that it sees, and which appeals, as though 
with visual music, to the heart. One sees 
that, in his letter to Crockett, where he 
speaks of Glencorse Kirk— the quiet 
cruciform structure which figures in Weir 
of Hermiston. "Do you know where the 
road crosses the burn under Glencorse 
Church? Go there, and say a prayer for 
me: moriturus salutat. See that it's a 
sunny day; I would like it to be a Sunday, 

67 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

but that's not possible in the premises; 
and stand on the right-hand bank just 
where the road goes down into the water, 
and shut your eyes, and if I don't appear 
to you! well, it can't be helped, and will be 
extremely funny." 

On his return from the South of Europe 
in 1874 he went to live at Swanston. The 
shadowof the Pentlands,and the sunshine 
drifting along their slopes, again moved 
about his life. In May the sleet was on the 
hills, for Swanston sits six hundred feet 
above the sea. He reclined there, quaff- 
ing the caller air. The high wintry wind' 
the grey sky, the clamour of blackbirds, 
"the bleating of sheep being shorn in a 
field near the garden," the gold coming 
out upon the whins, the great trailing 
flight of crows "passing continually be- 
tween the wintry leaden sky and the 
wintry cold-looking hills," these made up 
the environing picture of his soul's life at 
Swanston. Here he worked, and worked 

68 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

hard, striving ever after Literature, the 
purest, truest utterance of the best things 
and thoughts — seeking, beyond Journal- 
ism, the finer essences, the higher em- 
bodiment of the essential soul. Here he 
developed a gospel — thoughhis body was 
decrepit he seeks for cheer, and finds it by 
crowding hypochondria out of his lifewith 
the work whereby he fills it. "Nothing, 
indeed, but work all day long, except a 
short walk alone on the cold hills, and 
meals, and a couple of pipes with my father 
in the evening." 

His walks among the hills uplifted and 
solemnized his outlook, bringing him into 
contact with the heart of Nature, and with 
the striking, deeply sober originality of 
the grave men who herded sheep in lone- 
ly places, companioning with Thought — 
men whose brooding isolation kept their 
souls apart from overcrowding talk, until 
that uniqueness of view and expression 
which the world calls Originality, with 
69 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

quaintness frequent beneath its cloak, 
grew up within their hearts and moved 
upon their lips. 

S wanston was for him a place of miscell- 
aneous reading, working, and thinking. 
The Trial of Joan of Arc, Paston Letters, 
Basin the French historian, Boswe/l, Pil- 
grims Progress, and the book of wild, tu- 
multuous, gusty Nature, were his library 
there. And his fancy peopled its environ- 
ment with the crowd of its creations. S wan- 
ston Cottao^e fiqures i n St/vesas the home of 
Flora and her aunt Miss Gilchrist. When 
the French prisoner escapes from Edin- 
burgh Castle it is to S wanston that he flees 
for shelter. The drovers Simms and Cand- 
lish, who are to lead St Ives across the bord- 
ers, are pretty much John Tod the Swans- 
tonherdmade intotwins;and theyleadhim 
over the Pentlands to the great North road. 
So also in PFeir of Hermiston, though the 
geography is not exact, yet the places and 
descriptions are true to the " hills of home. ' 

70 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

The silence of the glens conferred upon 
him the wide-open observant eye and the 
responsive heart. He forgot the limitat- 
ions of the Edinburgh plainstones; he saw 
the mystery of the little worlds within the 
world of Nature.One can trace that through 
his letters. You can see him watch the 
plover, nervously flapping the attention of 
the wanderer away from his nest; or, in a 
brown muse, hepokes disaster into the big 
busy community of ants. He hears and 
sees what oftenis hid from the mere towns- 
man, the child of cities, enslaved to exist- 
ence in cramping streets. These things 
were enriching the essayist's vision, deep- 
ening his humanity, widening out his sym- 
pathy, giving him the secret of that uni- 
versal love without which, as the Scripture 
hath it, all earthly eloquence and human 
gifts are vain. He becomes as personal in 
his individual touch as Montaigne. He 
argues with his conscience over having 
been rude to one of the servants — he an- 
71 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

alyses his very worry over the apologiz- 
ing. 

Hewas stirredbythe activity of Nature, 
the sound of Nature's unrest. The garden 
at Swanston had its share of this kind of 
thing, when the wind blew straight out of 
the hills, laden with the breath of the 
whins. He says: "The trees were all in a 
tempest, and roared like a heavy surf; the 
paths all strewn with fallen apple-blossom 
and leaves, I got a quiet seat behind a yew 
and went away into a meditation. I was very 
happy after my own fashion, and whenever 
there came a blink of sunshine, or a bird 
whistled higher than usual, or a little pow- 
der of white apple-blossom came over the 
hedge and settled about me in the grass, I 
had the gladdest little flutter at my heart, 
and stretched myself for very voluptuous- 
ness." 

In the restfulness of the garden-house 
he was sometimes driven in upon himself; 
andquestions ofTo-morrow,andthe furth- 

72 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

er future veiled in the mystery of Beyond, 
combined with the wind-symphonies and 
the picture-makingspellof the mists, made 
hisdays only swift enough in their passing. 
He had thoughts, too, on topics that had 
perplexed him, which arguments with his 
father had not sweetened. Yet Time, not 
argument, was clarifying them. 

"This God may not be cruel when all is 
done; He may relent and be good to us a 
la fin des fins. Think of how He tempers 
our afflictions to us, of how tenderly He 
mixes in bright joys with the grey web of 
trouble and care that we call our life." 

He was extremely sensitive to the Pa- 
thetic Fallacy. 

"It maybe that two clods together, two 
flowers together, two grown trees together 
touching each other deliciously with their 
spread leaves, it may be that these dumb 
things have their own priceless sympath- 
ies, surer and more untroubled than ours." 

The influence of the lonely and remote 

n 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

environment played on his heart and feel- 
ings as on a most variedly sensitive in- 
strument. Sometimes he hated the noisy 
breezes. "In my hell," said he, "it would 
always blow a gale." In one of his most in- 
teresting letters he says: 

' ' The day was warm enough, but it blew 
a whole gale of wind;and the noise and the 
purposeless rude violence of it somehow 
irritated and depressed me. There was 
good news, however, though the anxiety 
must still be long. O peace, peace, whither 
are you fled and where have you carried 
my old quiet humour? I am so bitter and 
disquiet, and speak even spitefully to 
people. And somehow, though I promise 
myselfamendmentjday after day finds me 
equally rough and sour to those about me. 
But this would pass with good health and 
good weather; and at bottom I am not 
unhappy; the soil is still good although 
it bears thorns; and the time will come a- 
gain for flowers." 

74 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

Although his soul feels driven, buffeted 
and beaten by the wind that roars among 
the trees, though he knows that the hill- 
top is sheeted likea ghost in grey rain, and 
the valleysarefilled with mist, yet his heart 
is sheltered in warmth and quiet, the gar- 
den is fair and all its sweetness lying in the 
dim love-light of the veiled moon, and the 
lingering glamour of dying day; and he 
knows there is beauty still in the lovely 
world he lives in. But the knowledge has 
sorrow clinging to the skirt of its gladness. 
There is a shadow familiar to him in the 
sweetness of the scene. 

The questionings and lingerings about 
the door of the grave, so characteristic of 
Scottish Calvinism, are not necessarily 
morbid things, but just like going round 
about an old friend's house, trying the 
latch, and peeping in occasionally at the 
window. 

AtSwanston he was often ill and weary, 
but it was the anvil-hammering time, the 
75 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

crushing of thought into imperishable 
form in the laminated life. 

He was very sensitive to all sound. 'I 
have been made miserable," he wrote, 
"by Chopin's Marche Funebre. Reading 
those things which I like aloud when I am 
fancifully excited is the keenest artistic 
pleasure I know." This he inherited from 
his mother, who would sometimes be 
moved to tears even by an anthem in the 
church. Again, he writes under emotion: 
"The drums and fifes up in the castle were 
sounding the call through the dark. " These 
very frequendy went through his soul. 

Every aspect of Edinburgh spoke to 
him — the silence that sometimes holds 
the city as well as the sound that fills it. 
"The gardens below my windows are 
steeped in diffused sunlight, and every 
tree seems standing on tip-toe, strained 
and silent as though to get its head above 
its neighbours and listen. . . I wish I could 
make you feel the hush that is over every- 

76 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

thing, only made the more perfect by rare 
interruptions and the rich placid light and 
the still autumnal foliage." 

The summer days at Swanston enriched 
his heart's experience of communion with 
Nature; while in winter the swift glance, 
like a swallow's flight, across the Forth, 
from the back windows of Heriot Row, 
caught vision of the hills of Fife, beyond 
the shining Firth which "bridled the wild 
Hielan'man" in the days of old. Swanston 
gave him also word pictures which stand 
out clear and perfect in a line or two. "How 
the rain falls! The mist is quite low on the 
hill." 

He frequently felt his inertness as a re- 
proach;as though he were but "something 
for the winds to blow over, and the sun to 
glimpse on and go off again, as it might 
be a tree or a gravestone." At the same 
time he had a silver lining to his cloud, for 
almost in the same breath he says: 

"Here lam back again in my oldhumour 

n 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

of a sunny equanimity; to see the world 
fleet about me; and the days chase each 
other like sun patches, and the nights like 
cloud shadows, on a windy day; content 
to see them go, and no wise reluctant for 
the cool evening, with its dew, and stars, 
and fading stain of tragic red." 

Sometimes his love of country, obliter- 
ated by the mists of suffering and pain 
which he had endured as if at hard hands, 
broke through like a sunburst from behind 
the darkness. 

**I have been a Scotchman," said he, 
"all my life and denied my native land." 

Yet, again, he could laugh at it: 

"Here I am in my native land, being 
gently blown and hailed upon, and creep- 
ing closer and closer to the fire." 
The pathos of his struggle against the anx- 
ieties of life often peeps its head through 
the golden clouds. Although by 1887 he 
was worth about ^4000 a year, his income 
in 1880 was only ^^"109, but he declared 

78 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

himself ready to face the world on ;^200. 
He feels, as a test of success of his labour, 
"If you can interest a person for an hour 
and a half you have not been idle." He 
loves the balm a story gives in sick weari- 
ness. "We want incident, interest, action: 
to the devil with your philosophy. When 
we are well again, and have an easy mind, 
we shall peruse your important work. . . . 
So I, when I am ready to go beside myself, 
stick my head into a story-book, as the 
ostrich with her bush." 

His optimism had, however, many a 
struggle with pessimism, which was his 
chamber-companion also. "I am not well 
at all," he writes. "But hope to be better. 
. . . To-morrow I may be carrying topgal- 
lant sails again. But just at present I am 
scraping along with a jurymast and a kind 
of amateur rudder." 

There was more truth than perhaps he 
thought in his humoresque sketch of his 
tomb, with its motto — 
79 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

"ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

born 1850, of a family of engineers, 

died .... 

'Nitor aquis.' 

Home is the sailor, home from sea. 
And the hunter home from the hill. 

You, who pass this grave, put aside hatred ; 
love kindness; be all services remembered 
in your heart, and all offences pardoned." 

He was bravely content to suffer. He is 
a wounded soldier in the campaign of life. 
Yet he begs that he have not to suffer 
more than he can bear. "For that makes 
a man mad." At the same time he prays, 
"Never to sink up to my eyes in comfort, 
and grow dead in virtues and respect- 
ability." 

He sees the ennobling discipline of life's 
trials. He says: " I am a bad man by nature, 
I suppose; but I cannot be good without 
sufferinga little." Hediscerns,also, plainly, 
through that window of pain, what is the 
end of life — "The pleasurable death of 

80 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

self: a thing not to be attained because it 
is a thing belonging to heaven." 

He had the universal sympathy of the 
truest genius. As when he saw the little 
feathered world invaded by the terror of a 
hawk, and noted the songless thrill of fear 
that filled the garden. "I did not know be- 
fore, "he says, "that the voice of birds could 
be so tragically expressive. . . . Really, 
they almost frightened me; I could hear 
mothers and w-ives in terror for those who 
were dear to them." 

His frequent bitterness of utterance 
and discontent was not by any means his 
natural mood. He was not given to con- 
centration upon his own self. With that 
poetic altruism which made Burns, in the 
heart of storm and winter, think of the 
suffering creatures, he writes: 

"It is a fine strong night, full of wind; 
the trees are all crying out in the darkness; 
funny to think of the birds asleep outside, 
on the tossing branches, the little bright 
8i F 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

eyes closed, the brave wings folded, the 
little hearts that beat so hard and thick (so 
much harder and thicker than ever human 
heart) all stilled and quieted in deep 
slumber, in the midst of this noise and 
turmoil. Why, it will be as much as I can 
do to sleep in here in my walled room; so 
loud and jolly the wind sounds through 
the open window."Ashelistens, the night's 
unrest gets into his being. He sees the far- 
stretching world, of unknown and untra- 
versed spaces, the roads that wind away 
behind the hills, "the sleeping towns and 
sleeping farm-houses and cottages," the 
low places down beside the surf-beaten 
shores, and his fancy fares a-foot past 
them all, with Slumber following, red-eyed, 
behind him. 

In that same letter his wayward mood 
finds expression. It is the spirit of the 
essayist, tired with the struggle. 

The impulse to begin life at the very 
start of a fresh furrow, out under the clear 

82 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

azure coolness of the night, away from the 
fret and fever that have made his efforts 
such distress, and to go on, without turn- 
ing or returning, "until somewhere by a 
road-side or in some clean inn, clean death 
opened his arms to me and took me to his 
quiet heart for ever." It would be like fall- 
ing into that deep Sleep which tired hu- 
manity longs for, like a ripe thing, carrying 
the full heart of a chastened experience 
with him over the shadow-limit into the 
Land of Dawn. He has been friends with 
Death. H e has felt the grass and the daises 
growing out of his grave. He can laugh in 
the grim cold shadows, a ghost not fear- 
some, but familiar and friendly, with greet- 
ings for life, or its questionings, not a tear- 
ful good-bye. 

He was evidently, for the time, in that 
territory so familiar to him — "the desert 
of Cough, and by the ghoul-haunted wood- 
land of Fever." 

It gradually, in his separation, across the 

83 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

sea, became impossible for him to think 
of ever returning to his native land. The 
"Hills of Home" were to be always Hills 
of Dream.Tohave made the venture were 
to play with certain death, were to beguilty 
of something like an act of suicide. He 
schooled his heart to the deprivation; and 
wrote to Crockett, from Samoa: 
"I shall never take that walk by the Fish- 
er's Tryst and Glencorse. I shall never see 
Auld Reekie. I shall never set my foot a- 
gain upon the heather. Here I am until I 
die, and here will I be buried. The word is 
out,and thedoomwritten.Or, if I do come, 
it will be a voyage to a further goal." 

Crockett's words of dedication to him 
of The Stickit Minister had moved him 
very deeply to remembrance. He wrote 
from the depths of his being when he said: 

"It's a wrench not to be planted in Scot- 
land — that I can never deny — if I could 
onlybeburiedinthe hills,under the heath- 
er, and a table tombstone like the martyrs, 

84 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

where the vvhaups and plovers are crying! 
. . . Singular that I should fulfil the Scots 
destiny throughout, and live a voluntary 
exile, and have my head filled with the 
blessed beastly place all the time!" 

In this respect he hit, in his Master of 
Ballantrae, upon the contradiction that is 
within the love of a Scotsman for home, 
where he makes a character say that he 
has been guilty of two errors, in that he 

ever left his native city, and that he 
ever returned to it! 



CHAPTER SIX 

A"CLACHAN" LIKE 
Swanstonwascertaintohave 
its "character." And Steven- 
son's note-taking soul was 
just as certain to single him out. He found 
in Robert Young the old gardener a sub- 
ject worthy of his pen. 

Whether or no it be that in the inmost 
nature of our fellow countrymen there is a 
strong spice of original sin, making us sus- 
pect a truly lineal descent from the prim- 
ary delver, who leaned upon his spade in 
Eden's riggs looking around vainly for 
conversational diversion, until he sinned, 
and,beingflung out to perspire a wage, be- 
came father of all who plant cabbages, and 
progenitor of Flower Shows, so that Adam 
is still a common and favourite name in 
many Scottish families, and the laws of 
heredity make all head-gardeners Scots- 
men, one thing is certain, that the Scottish 
man who digs and plants seems always to 

87 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

Speak out of a long, ancient, and very inti- 
mate acquaintance with the beginnings of 
things. His soul, with roots of early know- 
ledge clinging to it, and much rudimentary 
clay, seems to have been turned out of pot 
after pot through multitudinous seasons 
and varieties of soil carrying each experi- 
ence with it. 

These characteristics make almost any 
gardener, like a minister's man, a deeply in- 
teresting subject of study. Stevenson was, 
however, wrong in thinking that Robert 
Young,the gardener at Swanston, was pro- 
bably the last. The type survives. The oc- 
cupation seems to produce the character. 

The agricultural farmer is generally 
more full of life-thoughts than the man 
whose days are devoted to "beasts." The 
growingof green things, thesowing, plant- 
ing, reaping, and in-gatheringof food-stuffs 
for earth's living creatures make for seas- 
ons of quiet reflective thought. While they 
are growing in the fields imagination has 

88 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

its times of brooding and enrichment. It 
has, besides, uniqueopportunities of look- 
ing in the eye of Nature and interpreting 
what is hid in Nature's heart. 

Especially is the man of plants a man 
of parts. He is also a man of ruminating 
tendencies. Indeed, every Scotsman has 
a reminiscent mind. The past is always 
close as his shadow behind him. Seen 
through the grey mist of a Scottish mem- 
ory, it is apt to become transfigured and 
transformed. Little things, mean enough 
to the eye of the ordinary Saxon soul, be- 
come ennobled. The casual word the 
Marquis dropped becomes lengthened in- 
to an intimate conversation; the wage of 
fifty years since, a princely income com- 
pared with the pittance which secures the 
serviceofto-day'sexperience. The forcing- 
frame becomes a vinery at least, and the 
garden of to-day a wretched thing of 
squalid plots, alongside of the great de- 
mesne which once the old Adam of cab- 
89 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

bages and calceolaries graced with his 
presence, and ruled as King of Spades. 
The Scottish workman, the more he loves 
his master, loves the more to impressupon 
him his own condescension in giving his 
valuable labour to him, and to show some- 
times, by a gesture pregnant with mean- 
ing beyond words, how well within the 
grip of his own hand is the problem of his 
present sphere. He may show this by the 
long list of gardening implements which 
he details as being necessary for the prop- 
er working of his field of labour, which 
has Art behind it, and which if his master 
purchase he will be apt to find lying un- 
used in the stick-shed ere a month go by. 
Further, his quiet hours among growing 
things become woven together into a kind 
of fragrant loneliness, begetting an array 
of solitary thoughts set in families, maxims 
of life with the smack of proverbial litera- 
ture about them, and deeds clothed in the 
characteristics of dignified personality. 

90 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

Originality seems to spring from the 
soil. No soul passes its time in close con- 
tact with fields, furrows, and forests, with- 
out acquiring its peculiar tang in thought, 
deed, andexpression. Poachers, fishermen, 
and shepherds all have it. But gardeners 
exhale it. 

It was, therefore, a very precious ex- 
perience that Stevenson had through his 
association in the garden at Swanston 
with old Robert Young. And it is well 
that his distemper portrait of the old man 
was not allowed to lie forgotten in the 
pages of the College Magazine, which, 
after four public appearances, died a quiet 
death from defective circulation. One can 
see the veteran moving about among his 
flower-plots, under the quiet hills, and 
hear his gentle brag of the great days in 
Eden, before the fall into the meaner con- 
descensions of his later toils. 

His appropriation of what he worked 
amongst is peculiar to his class, who in- 
91 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

variably identify themselves with whatso- 
ever they take in hand. I have known a 
beadle, who, having assured himself, tried 
hard to assure the ministerthat the people 
had been turning out better on Sundays 
since he began to ring the bell and carry 
up the books; while I have also heard as 
common every-day statements from the 
lips of the "second man in the parish," re- 
miniscences of "the last time we baptised 
a child here," or "the last marriage at 
which we officiated." 

The mind of a Scottish gardener of the 
old school becomes the sheltering-place of 
innumerable quaint notions, which seem 
to walk out and in, as if from stage doors, 
at the most unexpected moments, with the 
mostunanticipated remarks. I well remem- 
ber one such who admired the sententious 
semi-theological phraseology of the min- 
ister's man. The latter functionary was an 
authority on bees, and if at any time in the 
parish, during the swooning summer, a 

92 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

crowd was seen gazing open-mouthed into 
a tree, a passer-by would be justified in 
concluding that it was the church-officer 
securing a swarm. 

"Do you know, "asked the old gardener 
of me, one day as I met him with the 
forester — "Do you know what I think, 
sometimes, when Tammas goes up into 
the pulpit wi' the books, and gives the 
Bible a clap on the sma' o' the back, and 
takes a look round the Kirk? Well," he 
said, perfectly gravely, and with honest 
intention, "I aye think a short discourse 
on bees would be very acceptable!" 

Old Robert Young of Swanston, who 
despised with infinite pity the latter-day 
love of gewgaws, and tried to curb the 
tendency by developing troops of cauli- 
flowers and cabbages across the flower- 
beds, was of the true Scottish stamp. Two 
hundred years before his own day, he 
would have been tramping in the army of 
theCovenant.or discussing when the con- 

93 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

venticle was over, knotty points of Scrip- 
ture and questionable interpretations of 
abstruse dogma; for his life, and the life of 
his kind, was nourished on daily scraps 
that had dropped as if from tables of stone, 
out of the Hebrew Scriptures. 

His dreams were doubtless filled with 
shadows, of date probably not much later, 
as a general rule, than the Mosaic Dis- 
pensation; and yet he would have his own 
views on the crossing of Greenland, which 
would be as clear as those which he held 
about the crossing of the Red Sea, regard- 
ing which he probably knew just as much. 
He would have his own opinion also, of 
the character and conduct of the patri- 
archs, and would be apt to despise Adam 
forlosing a good situation over a deprav- 
ed taste in apples. His Scotchness would 
come out like a stone-crop of contradic- 
toriness, which, breaking through the 
close-trimmed lawn of his suavity, just 
served the purpose of preventing the de- 

94 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

velopment of false conceit in those with 
whom he held converse. We can under- 
stand the old man being proud of his 
age, yet shaking a deprecating head over 
his three-score years and ten, remember- 
ing how they were "few and evil"; while, 
at the same time, he would resent deeply 
the application of the adjective "auld" 
to himself. Each day draws a picture 
of its passing, over his heart, his work 
bending him to its own shape; the earth 
he serves and feeds drawing him nearer to 
her bosom, as a mother draws a reluctant 
child close to her in the descending shad- 
ows, till with a quiet surprise at theliberty, 
and astonished at the careless forgetful- 
ness of Providence, he is blinded, and 
gagged, and carried off by death, the con- 
queror of kings and gardeners,tothe green 
places far beyond the limit of this world 
of changing seasons and Flower-Shows. 
Yet ever, insome reproduction of his kind, 
one feels as though he had really come 
95 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

through a resurrection; for, so long as 
Scotland lives, the old Scotch gardener 
can never die. It was, therefore, the de- 
piction of a deathless type that Stevenson 
gives us on his clever page, a type that 
still goes on, pottering among greenhous- 
es and cabbages, under the shadow of the 
Hills of Home. 

Alongside of his picture of the gardener 
stands that of the other native character, 
John Tod, the shepherd of the Pentlands. 

The Nature love of the early world 
brought down, todwell amongstthe sheep- 
cotes and pastoral glens, the gods who 
loved to sit by shepherds' fires, and share 
the rude repasts in huts where poor men 
lay. I wonder how they would have fared 
in intercourse with some of our Scottish 
herds, sun-burned and wind-tanned, and 
hoarse with shouting to their dogs! They 
live in a world of their own. Knowledge, 
strong, big, and solitary, fearless with the 
fearlessness as of a deity's, and as confid- 

96 




o = s 

Si.,. 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

ent of infallibleness, springs up within the 
heart of such a man; for, where there is 
none to contend against his will, and where 
a man is literally lord of the creatures, is it 
a wonder that he will shout his opinions 
in the face of constable and parson, and 
ban upon the hillside, unhesitatingly, a 
contumacious world? The man of sheep 
is Nature's general. From his knoll he 
takes in at one glance the arrangement of 
a whole campaign, sending out his four- 
legged scouts andwise lieutenants, to turn 
the flanks of scattered droves and bands of 
scared and scampering sheep. He has a 
code of his own, too — a whistle, a wave of 
the hand, a yelp, or aword out of a vocabul- 
ary which no philologer can ever run to 
earth, in its remote sources away among 
nomad pastoralities. His commands toler- 
ate no contradiction, and are above all 
question; and woe to the canine intellig- 
ence which flickers, even for a second, out 
of the line of perfect understanding. He is 
97 G 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

apt to think meanly, you may be sure, of 
the other pastor in the parish who does his 
shouting only on one day in the week 
when the John Tods of the parish are 
silent; and does it, too, not on the hillside, 
but in the fold; flinging out his commands 
not to sheep-dogs but to the flock direct, 
just as much to their confusion and bewild- 
erment as would ensue were the same 
method applied by John Tod himself! I 
can hear him saying, with a snort, on a 
wind-swept grassy headland in the hills, 
"What wonder though his flock scatter 
with such a herding, when the pastor him- 
self is sheep-dog and shepherd, and there 
isn't a well-trained collie among them." 

The town man laughs to see the big 
hodden-clad son of the hills stupefied a- 
mong swift cars and motor bicycles, not 
able to find hisway, without multitudinous 
bumpings, along broad crowded pave- 
ments. Yet let him loose in the trackless 
wild, in the teeth of snow and hail that 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

obliterate all things — see him in the 
swamp, or on the face of a swooning cliff, 
after a lamb that has wandered, or a sheep 
that has been lost, and you see the noblest 
bit of fearlessness and indefatigable assid- 
uity indomitable, thatyour mortal eyes will 
ever look upon this side of the stars. He 
fears no human face; no title and no rank 
have consideration from him alongside 
of the interests of his flock. No mother's 
passion for her child, no love of patriot 
for his fatherland, ever could eclipse the 
strenuous devotion to solitary duty, the 
blazing tempestuous courage of the shep- 
herd, child of the glens among the 
"Hills of Home." 



J 



CHAPTER SEVEN 

IT IS REMARKABLE THAT 
he who knew so much of human 
character did not, in his work, make 
that use which might have been ex- 
pected of the complex nature of woman- 
hood. It is true that this, and even more, 
has been said so often, that it has been 
accepted without question that Stevenson 
could not draw women at all. That he was 
himself conscious of this, we can see from 
his letter to Marcel Schwob where hesays: 
" Vous nedetesteiz pas alorsmes bonnes 
femmes? Moi, je les deteste. I have never 
pleased myself with any women of mine 
save two character parts, one of only a 
few lines — the Countess of Rosen, and 
Madame Desprez in the Treasure of 
Franc hardy 

Nevertheless, it is also true that one has 
only to read his letters to see how he could 
interest women in him — a proof that he 
was not without the power of being inter- 

lOI 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

ested in them. Further, I think it is quite 
plain that he was not seized by the master 
passion until late in his career, when he 
met the woman who possessed him to the 
end. Besides, he wrote many of his stories 
forthestory'ssake,studyingcertainactions 
of men, who were impulse-driven byother 
motives and purposes than those of sex. 
They are the adventures of men banished 
and driven from home, not in consequence 
of contact with feminine intrigue, but by 
the greed of gold, by outre passion, and 
by the love of adventure. Yet when pro- 
bably impelled to do so by the fact of 
grumbling criticism, he does bring in the 
feminine legend, I do not think that any 
fair-minded critic could say that he fails. 
Besides, sex problems are not absolutely 
necessary in romance. Although the tend- 
er passion has made for more romantic 
situation than anything else in the world, 
yet there have been other impulses which 
have affected the relations of individuals 

I02 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

and communities sufficiently to create 
positions of intense emotional interest. 
The conflict of a heart against itself, of a 
soul against its destiny, are all sufficiently 
moving and absorbing to fill a canvas. 
Stevenson's mental interests were in re- 
ality,atheart, historical and psychological. 
He concentrates in Kidnapped upon the 
mystery of the Appin murder rather than 
on the slow fire of David Balfour's love. 
It is not, in fact, primarily a love story at 
all, but a study of the character of Alan 
Breck the Highlander in contrast to David 
Balfour the slow-witted Lowlander. So 
with the majority of his tales. His women 
were perhaps mostly in his story as pivots, 
or in order that they might do something 
for the men that are in it. This was quite 
natural, from the position of women in a 
typical Scottish household, and from the 
semi-Hebraic Biblical point of view of old 
Thomas Stevenson the novelist's father. 
The women of his youth who had a sense 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

of enfranchisement were apt to be looked 
upon as eccentrics by the staid standards 
of Edinburgh society. It was still the day 
of the indoors woman. Models for Mrs 
Weir of Hermiston were not difficult to 
find — the peevish textifier, confined to 
her sofa, a kind of drawing-room martyr 
with a "tidy" on her. The fact is, that, for 
the purposes of Stevenson's story, the 
women had just to be as he made them. 
I am not sure that his own estimate in his 
letter to Schwob in regard to Countess 
Rosen is correct, for it is as difficult for a 
man to make a fair estimate of the off- 
spring of his mind as of that of his body. 
Each reader is free to choose his own 
heroine to fall in love with. Stevenson had 
to depict the women he knew as he saw 
them, not as we do. His women were 
women of whim. Their angels do tweak 
the ear of their purpose sometimes. 

In Weir of Hermiston, however, that 
masterly torso, bearing about its lines the 

104 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

marks and imprint of great art, and in- 
sight, the two Kirsties stand out limned 
clearly and possessingly. It is the fashion 
to concentrate praise on Kirstie the elder, 
but the picture of her niece is one of the 
masterpieces of literary portraiture of a 
girl's soul. It would be interesting to know 
a truer picture, with a deeper inner know- 
ledge of feminine human nature than it 
shows. One cannot, at the same time, for- 
get the tragedy of the midnight scene of 
the heart-wrung passionateness of the 
elder Kirstie's pleading. 

It is also the vogue to scorn Stevenson's 
picture of Catriona, calling her "a boy 
dressed in girl's clothes." This cry, re- 
peated by the multitude that so readily 
take their opinions fromanybody'sprinted 
page, has been attempted to be met by the 
supposition that those critics have never 
been in love. It is, however, far clearer 
that they do not understand the character 
of a Highland woman. Catriona is not a 
105 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

mere dairy- maid, but a personality instinct 
with the feelings of a Highland lady. Her 
fidelity, her patience, her devotion, the 
constancy of her affection, win the heart 
even of the reader who may have pre- 
possessions against her, as gently and as 
surely as in real life she would have done. 
Nor is the feminine naive gravity of Miss 
Barbara Grant in the samestoryacreation 
in fustian and sawdust, but feminine to her 
finger-tips, and true to her class. Olalla 
too — what a thing of passion she is! While, 
as for a simple Scottish girl — what a 
glimpse is that of "the nameless lass "who 
helps Alan Breck and David Balfour to 
get across the Forth, in their flight. In a 
touch or two she seizes our visual imagin- 
ation and vanishes. One can hearthe flutter 
of her skirts as she escapes from our 
presence. 

His highest reach in his womenkind 
was undoubtedly Kirstie Elliot, senior, 
the true Scottish muirland woman, with a 

1 06 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

lash-snap in the whip of her words. 
Kirstie theyounger is also a truedaughter 
of the Hills of Home, so different from her 
aunt — quite evidently a careful study of 
genuine womanhood. Of course she has no 
depth in her — she is only a sunny pool rip- 
pled by any passing breath, shadowed by 
the wind of any passing bird. 

If in any way Robert Louis Stevenson 
failed or seemed to fail in his depiction of 
womanhood, it was not from want of 
knowledge of the sex, for he was passion- 
ate, and he knew passionate secrets. 
Speaking, in his letters, of the Elgin 
Marbles, he says, "If one could love a 
woman like that once, see her once grow 
pale with passion, and once wring your 
lips out upon hers, would it not be a small 
thing to die." 

It is so difficult in ordinary life to 
fathom the sunsmit, shadow-chased per- 
sonality of woman, so ready for leal self- 
abnegation, so prompt to do and dare for 
107 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

sweet love's sake, yet so often in the grip 
of fickle whim and passing mood, that 
only a great artist can catch and fix the 
lines of a true portrait; sometimes, indeed, 
the greatest artist only by suggestion 
settles the eluding sylphlike personality 
upon the canvas of imagination. Yet it 
cannot be denied that such feminine 
characters as Stevenson has touched and 
quickened have not been unknown to 
many through whose lives they have sent 
their lasting influence; and it must just be 
taken for granted that their kind have 
passed by the grumblers. 

His verse, especiallyhis Scottish verse, 
is not his greatest creation. He would not 
himself have claimed it to be so. His 
models are rather obvious. 

From what he himself says he felt very 
much the influence of hapless Robert Fer- 
gusson. Sometimes, indeed, he thought 
he was a reincarnation of that poet. It was 
natural that the fate of that young Edin- 

io8 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

burgh man, whose health and reason 
were shattered by Bohemian dissipations, 
should have appealed very powerfully to 
Stevenson who moved through a Bo- 
hemian world also. Superlative though 
the poems of Burns be, it is undeniable 
that his chequered career intensely deep- 
ened Stevenson's interest in his life. 
Stevenson's verse utterance follows in all 
details the Scottish traditions. He does 
not, in fact, make in them a new contrib- 
ution to the stock, although his personal 
voice and view are present. What is 
known as the Habbie Simson stave, a 
form called by Allan Ramsay the "stand- 
ard Habbie," and which was especially 
used in Scottish poetry for epistolary 
verse, was for the most part his medium 
of expression. This measure itself had a 
history of its own. It was troubadour in 
origin, and from the thirteenth to the 
fifteenth century was in use in England. 
In the eleventh century Count William of 
109 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

Poitiers wrote in it. From courtly singers 
it passed out, however, to be a favourite 
measure of singers in courts and alleys, 
and after a most varied history it became, 
after 1640, the model of Scottish verse, 
until Burns made it practically the metri- 
cal uniform of his muse. This was the 
verse used by Stevenson in A Lowde7i 
Sabbath Morn, in which he laughs, not a 
sardonic laugh, but a genial sympathetic 
appreciation of the humours of the relig- 
ious habits of his native land and fellow- 
countrymen. \viA Lowden Sabbath Morn 
he employs the same arts of the master- 
craftsman, with choice of vocalic effect 
and picturesque presentment of fact and 
character, as in his Essays. 

The clinkum-clank o' Sabbath bells 
Noo to the hoastin' rookery swells, 
Noo faintin' laigh in shady dells. 

Sounds far and near, 
An' through the simmer kintry tells 

Its tale o' cheer. 

True to the life is the picture of the ham- 

IIO 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

let gathering for worship in the church- 
yard, where 

The prentit stanes that mark the deid, 
Wi' lengthened lip, the sarious read; 
Syne wag a moraleesin' heid, 

An' then and there 
Their hirplin' practice an' their creed 

Try hard to square. 

Inside the sacred building the minister 
expounds to the drowsing parish, redolent 
of peppermint and southernwood, the sins 
of others, and especially 

the fau'ts o' ither kirks, 

An' shaws the best o' them 
No muckle better than mere Turks, 

When a's confessed o' them. 
Bethankit! what a bonny creed! 
What mair would ony Christian need? — 
The braw words rumm'le ower his heid, 

Nor steer the sleeper; 
And in their restin' graves, the deid 

Sleep aye the deeper. 

In somewhat more of the spirit of Satire 
he looks through the eye of a Scotsman 
returned from abroad with the hunger for 
the old doctrines of his youth, after the 
III 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

spiritual unsettlement of the landsthrough 
which he has been wandering. He lays a 
finger on the weaknesses of his people. 
Scots folks have always been fond of their 
own way in religious forms of worship. 
Each individual likes to have his own kind 
of faith. When an Englishman quarrels 
with another Englishman he sulks or com- 
mits a breach of the peace, but when a 
Scotsman has a quarrel he goes off and 
founds a sect. No matter on how slight a 
ground the quarrel occurs, say, from the 
use of a harmonium to the singing of a 
hymn, or the taking up of a collection, he 
will always find plenty to follow him, till 
there be enough to have amongst them 
another schism, or two. Stevenson hits this 
off with a twinkling eye, and his tongue in 
his cheek, while he also touches lightly on 
the queer combination of spirituality and 
spirituosity which was once the note of 
Scottish faith. 

Despite the innovations of hymn books 

I 12 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

and the gesturing manners of the new 
precentor, the returned emigrant foundhis 
old satisfaction from thegeneral sweeping 
condemnation of everything and every- 
body which formed the staple of the prea- 
cher's word. 

I owned, wi' gratitude and wonder. 
He was a pleisure to sit under. 

His Scottish poems give clear impres- 
sions of Nature, religion, and life in his 
native land. For example, how Horatian 
is the spirit of this picture. 

Frae nirly, nippin', Eas' Ian' breeze, 
Frae Norlan' snaw, an' haar o' seas, 
Weel happit in your gairden trees, 

A bonny bit, 
Atween the muckle Pentland's knees. 

Secure ye sit 

Frae the high hills the curlew ca's; 
The sheep gang baaing by the wa's; 
Or whiles a clan o' roosty craws 

Cangle thegether; 
The wild bees seek the gairden raws, 

Weariet wi' heather. 

Or in the gloamin' douce an' gray 
The sweet-throat mavis tunes her lay; 

113 H 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

The herd comes linkin* doun the brae; 

An' by degrees 
The muckle siller mune maks way 

Amang the trees. 

The last verse especially is a beautiful 
reminiscence of the ** Hills of Home." 



CHAPTER EIGHT 

WHERE DID HE GET 
the charm of his writing, 
with its incisive phrase, its 
necromantic glamour, its 
vistas of stillness and charm, with episodes 
that hush the heart as though we get in that 
moment a glimpse into the bacchanal- 
haunted glades, where Dionysus leads the 
king, in the palinode of Euripides? 

The man himself did not know. When 
he tries to tell us, he attempts what is be- 
yond the reach of his own real knowledge. 
He looked back on the nearest stepping- 
stones whichonlyhad led him over thelast 
brookhehad crossed in his pilgrimage;but 
he forgot the heart-seeking voice of the 
bugles in the dark, up on the magic Castle- 
rock, encrusted with memories of the old 
struggles of the makers of Edinburgh, the 
haunting shadows of the midnight streets, 
the lone peaks that had looked at him 
through the grey mist, the running waters 
115 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

in the hills that had broken in upon him in 
the wakeful intervals of his sleeping, the cry 
of the winds on the grey crags of Kirk Yet- 
ton, the honeysuckle and the rose-leaves 
tost at his feet over the dyke of the garden 
at Swanston. Ay, and the shadows of the 
fathers of his race, who had struo^orled in 
border foray and in conflicts with the sea. 
Stevenson was, and still is, largely and 
widely misunderstood by certain stupid 
people of whom and of whose kind there 
are always plenty in the world ready to 
take an author absolutely literally at his 
word; and so, reading Stevenson's state- 
ments as to the books and authors that in- 
fluenced him in the reminiscences of his 
wide reading, are prematurely ready to ac- 
cept him as having been, for the mostpart, 
as he puts it, "the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, 
to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas 
Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Mon- 
taigne, to Baudelaire, and to Obermann." 
What he meant by using that phrase is eas- 

ii6 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

ily understood by every reflective reader, 
and especially by every man who writes, 
and knows his business. He was sharpen- 
ing his sword. Every artist has to begin, 
in a sense, as a copyist, in order to learn 
the use of his tools. No man becomes a 
master by hitting out in the dark. 

We can perceive and appreciate the 
"sedulous ape" business, for example, in 
such a thing as his analysis of the contra- 
dictories in man, where there is proof that 
the shadows of Bacon and Pascal stood 
each at the writer's shoulder while he 
wrote: 

"What a monstrous spectre is this man, 
the disease of the agglutinated dust, lift- 
ing alternate feet or lying drugged with 
slumber; killing, feeding, growing, bring- 
ing forth small copies of himself; grown 
upon with hair like grass, fitted with eyes 
that move and glitter in his face; a thing 
to set children screaming! — and yet, look- 
ed at nearlier, known as his fellows knows 
117 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

him, how surprising are his attributes!" 
And so forth, in similar strain. 

That he owed something also to Jean- 
Jacques Rousseau is manifest, from the 
following, taken at random from the Con- 
fessions'. 

"There is something in walking that 
stirs and quickens my ideas; I can hardly 
think when I remain in one place; my 
body must be on the move to set my mind 
agoing. The sight of the country, the suc- 
cession of agreeable views, the open air, 
the big appetite, the good health I win by 
walking, the freedom of the Inn, the ab- 
sence of everything that makes me feel 
my dependence, everything that reminds 
me of my situation, all this loosensmysoul, 
gives me a greater audacity to think, 
throws me, so to speak, into the immens- 
ity of beings, to combine them, to choose 
them, to appropriate them at my will, with- 
out fear or constraint. I dispose of all Nat- 
ure like a master." 

ii8 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

Or again, take this: 

"I lay down voluptuously on the ledge 
of a sort of recess or false door let into the 
wall of a terrace. ... A nightingale was 
just overhead, and I went to sleep to its 
song; my slumbers were sweet, my awak- 
ening was still more so. It was broad day- 
light; my eyes, on opening, saw the water, 
the verdure, a wonderful landscape. I got 
up and shook myself; I felt hungry; I 
wended my way gaily to the town, re- 
solved to spend two pieces of six blanks, 
that I still had left, in a good breakfast." 

One might almost feel as though Stev- 
enson's voice were here speaking, as 
though his genius had made response to 
the French influence of old treaty connec- 
tions with the Southern land and its sunny 
champaigns, verdant, and gay with laugh- 
ter and with songs of nightingales and 
happy wayfarers. 

In fact, words were his comrades. He 
carried in his pockets one book to read in, 
119 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

and another to write in, writing not for 
publication, but as a child would learn to 
walk, by exercise of its limbs. Sometimes, 
thus, he would catch a thought worth 
keeping, as one might hap upon an escap- 
ing angel. His experience was indeed just 
the same as that of any imaginative boy 
with the lure of Literature before him. 

In his correspondence he once declared 
that he had moulded his style on theweird 
pages of Patrick Walker, the grim cove- 
nanting pedlar. I am certain this meant 
little more, however, than just that the 
"far ben" glimpses of the recesses of the 
human soul with which Walker's pages 
abound had given hush to his own fancies, 
and made them stand a-tip-toe often, with 
finger on their lips. He was, indeed, so 
sensitively responsive to directness and 
strength of utterance that he was apt to 
feel that he owed everything to the last 
vivid thing he read; and, doubtless, for a 
time the ripple of the last stone that fell in- 

120 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

to the pool of his consciousness kept mov- 
ing slowly onward to the shore. Almost 
fromhis earliest he was,ashesaid,astudent 
of methods of expression; also, he read 
everything, everywhere, anyhow. 

One can easily trace also the vivid in- 
fluence of Walt Whitman — the astonish- 
ing naked man of modern literature. 

Besides, what is originality, but the 
individual's own interpretation of what, 
after all, must be, at this time of day, the 
great universal common-places of life and 
thought? 

The more widely a wise and clever man 
reads, the more he will interpret his read- 
ing by the varied and ever-varying library 
of Humanity. In the wide world he finds 
his true commentary. The heart of man is 
his whetstone. 

Stevenson did not really need other 
men's mirrors. He needed no second-hand 
inspiration. He had skylights of his own. 
He did not require to pay ferrymen's fees; 

121 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

he could be his own steersman, sailing the 
wide seas of imagination. He knew the 
secrets of life and death intimately — they 
haunt a Bohemian world. The man who 
lives in Bohemia is apt neither to take 
death so seriously as that grim visitant 
expects, nor even mirth so lightly as men 
look for. So Stevenson is a man earnest — 
inevitably so.seeingashe does, howsevere 
is the heart of things; and yet he smiles, 
for he has the magician's gift,and can work 
a transformation scene. He can afford quiet 
laughter to illumine his stage, though, at 
the same time, making one feel, knowing 
what one does know, that he is sometimes 
playing jigs to keep up our hearts during 
the acting of the tragedy. He was, in fact, 
an instinctive rebel against conventions, 
both of joy and sorrow. He was a born 
actor, for he was "of imagination all com- 
pact." 

Now, each man can breathe his own 
feeling even into another man's notes, so 

122 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

long as he play on his own fiddle. I U-trained 
and ill-tempered critics, with narrow out- 
look and vague experience of life and liter- 
ature, are prone to confuse issues in such 
a matter. It is true, for example, that the 
mystery story may appeal to the creative 
imagination sufficiently to beget another 
of its own kind. One would expect, in the 
nature of things, that this should be so. 
But it does not at all follow that Edgar 
Allan Poe is the father of Stevenson. He 
himself declared in writing Treasure Is- 
land that he was to write a pirate story 
"in the old way." But, just as with a singer 
using a set form of notes, he gives it, even 
in an exercise, the turn of his own voice. 
After all, the possible situations of diffic- 
ulty in human experience have their limit- 
ations;and it is, indeed, amazing that such 
variety can be built up out of a vocabulary 
which, even at its widest, has its restric- 
tions. 

The craze for crude comparisons in 
123 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

present-day criticism is often only a mode 
of cheap clap-trap. Nothing was cheaper 
for example, than to call Stevenson the 
modern Scott, the modern Burns, the Scot- 
tish Addison or Steele. Scott and Burns 
are the crest of their wave. They are alone. 
They maygive,bythe ictus of their genius, 
impetus to otherminds,butthe'rlion-skins 
are not transferable, any more than their 
personalities. Besides, the fact that a man 
wri tes about i^'/yzWr.^or the Jacobites does 
not justify a comparison with Hamlet or 
Waverley. The true comparison by a true 
critic is the comparison of a man with his 
own previous work, which may be his best 
or his worst. All the same, of course, no 
man living or writing in the world of im- 
aginative creation can help being splashed 
a little with some spray from theperennial 
fountains of Montaigne, Pepys, Scott, 
Balzac, Dumas, and the rest. 

For those who believe in portents, such 
can be found in Stevenson's record. The 

124 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

legend of a laughter-chased shadow as a 
remote Celtic progenitor was his. We hear 
its echo often. Even in his earliest child- 
hood he was brought in a remarkable and 
dangerous way into contact with the Bo- 
hemian world, through the habits of his 
first nurse. She was unfortunately much 
addicted to alcohol, and was discovered in 
a public-house very drunk, while the tiny 
Robert Louis, tied up like a parcel, lay on 
a shelf behind the bar. A portrait of the 
young adventurer among the pewters 
would be a striking frontispiece! Another 
proved as perilous an experiment; and 
then "Cummy," Alison Cunningham, was 
secured, a precious and inestimable poss- 
ession. Her tales ofweirdry, her ballad lore, 
and, above all, her rich Scottish vocabul- 
ary, had very probably much more to do 
with the moulding of his world of praise 
than he was aware of. I believe, in fact, 
that it cannot be doubted that he owed for 
style, thought, and matter to "Cummy" 
125 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

his old nurse, who must have fed hisyoung 
imagination with many a draught drawn 
from the deep well of her remembrance, 
far more than his fancied indebtedness to 
Hazlitt and the rest. The relationship be- 
tween her and him was one of intense love. 
Her kindness and devotion to him must 
have been deep as that of a mother. What 
he wrote to her he meant, when he said: 

"Donot suppose that I shall everforget 
those long, bitter nights, when I coughed 
and coughed andwas so unhappy,and you 
were so patient and loving with a poor,sick 
child. Indeed, Cummy, I wish I might be- 
come a man worth talkingof, if it were only 
that you should not have thrown away 
your pains." 

His imagination had a very weird side 
to it, which might partly be traced to the 
influence of thisdeardelightful old woman. 
"Do you know," he writes of one of his 
tales, "thisstoryof mine is horrible; I only 
work at it by fits and starts, because I feel 

126 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

as If Itwere a sort of crime against human- 
ity — it is so cruel." Of course it cannot be 
denied that, at the back of the Scottish 
genius, right up against the humour of the 
race, there is a chord that vibrates to the 
sardonic grim key-note of Tophet. 

From the earhest time Literature had 
him on her leash. It was with a sorely dis- 
appointed heart that his father saw his son 
turn away resolutely from the profession of 
engineering, which was the tradition of 
their family. He made a struggle to obey 
his father's will in this respect, playing at 
engineering at Anstruther and at Wick, 
by day giving some kind of attention to his 
father's work, but by night, in the silence 
of his room, touching what to him was real 
life, modulatingandmouldinghis thoughts, 
and trying to master the art of expressing 
them. 

He loved the outdoor life, and so per- 
haps it was not only to oblige his father 
that he entered into engineering, with a 
127 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

hearty dislike for it. It was not unprofit- 
able for his future, for it gave him a living 
experience among men and ships, with a 
romantic acquaintance with quays, and 
harbours, and the mystery of the sea, 
which stood him in good stead, and was 
extremely creative in relation to his later 
work. In a large degree, also, it suited his 
Bohemian tastes and love for composite 
companionships. 

The hard recognition that engineering 
was impossible as a profession for him 
having been faced, he read, or was sup- 
posed to read, for the Scottish Bar. Be- 
hind all things, however, the shadow of 
Literature, with a star upon its brow, still 
beckoned him to follow. 

His Bohemian companionships, the mis- 
cellaneous friendships and acquaintances 
which he loved to make, especially among 
the common people, were strongly creat- 
ive influences in his life and thought. He 
is, indeed, essentially, and very largely 

128 



V 






1 






m 


^. 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

through this, the voice of the Scottish 
mind, as it looks on the stern and "paw- 
kie" side of things, almost in the same 
glance. The Scottish peasant lends him- 
self very much to such opportunities of 
friendship and intimacy with his super- 
iors, and one can see how both they and 
Stevenson would enjoy the occasion. A 
glimpse of that kind of thing emerges in 
one of his letters to Mrs Sitwell. 

He tells howa shower of raindrove him 
for shelter into a tumble-down steading, 
where he fell into conversation with "a 
labourer cleaning a byre." In any other 
country he would have fought shy of com- 
munion with a man of that class, but re- 
membering that he was in Scotland he 
plunged into a discussion upon Education 
and Politics. The clear mother-wit of the 
Scottish peasant quickened the mind of 
the man of culture, by its clear-visioned 
perception of what had perplexed him in 
the state of the peasant people of Suffolk. 
129 I 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

And, further, he gave the literary student 
of men and manners an encouraging up- 
lift, when he declared that he could not 
understand how any man who had a defi- 
nite aim in life could be daunted or cast 
down. 

" They that havehadaguidschoolin' and 
do nae mair, whatever they do, they have 
done; but him that has aye something a- 
yont need never be weary.' ... I think the 
sentiment will keep, even through a 
change of words, something of the heart- 
some ring of encouragement that it had 
for me; and that from a man cleaning a 
byre! You see what John Knox and his 
schools have done." 

One can easily see this lean man of 
genius loving to talk even to "a labourer 
cleaning a byre," while outside the rain 
patters, making the dust lift up as it hits 
the earth with a "ping," and the roar of 
the mill-lade punctuates the conversation. 
It creates a strong epithetic picture. 

130 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

That same letter has a touch of the 
Stevenson of the most intimate essays, 
especially in regard to the power, which 
was his own, of making even sound al- 
most visible. For example: 

" We lay together a long time on the 
beach; the sea just babbled among the 
stones; and at one time we heard the hol- 
low, sturdy beat of the paddles of an un- 
seen steamer somewhere round the cape." 
It makes the stillness of a library vibrate. 

One catches also a real touch of theborn 
essayist in his letter to Baxter of October 
1872, which is, in reality, a discourse on 
Fooldom, as concentrated as a pearl. It is 
so perfect and concise that it must be re- 
produced in his own words. 

" That is a happy land, if you like — and 
not so far away either. Take a fool's advice 
and let us strive without ceasing to get in- 
to it. Hark in your ear again: 'they allow 

PEOPLE TO REASON IN THAT LAND.' I wish I 

could take you by the hand and lead you 
131 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

away into its pleasant boundaries. There 
is no custom-house on the frontier, and 
you may take in what books you will. 
There are no manners and customs; but 
men and women grow up, like trees in a 
still, well-walled garden, 'at their own 
sweet will ' There is no prescribed or cus- 
tomary folly — no motley, cap, or bauble: 
out of the well of each one's own innate 
absurdity he is allowed and encouraged 
freely to draw and to communicate; and it 
is a strange thing how this natural fooling 
comes so nigh to one's better thoughts of 
wisdom; and stranger still, that all this dis- 
cord of people speaking in their own natur- 
al moods and keys, masses itself into a far 
more perfect harmony than all the dismal, 
official unison in which they sing in other 
countries. Parting-singing seems best all 
the world over." 



CHAPTER NINE 

IN MANYTHINGS HE MUST 
be measured very largely by his 
heart. Though he laughed at church- 
es he did not laugh at the principle 
which was behind them, for he was a child 
of his race and of his family. And he had 
not a snigger in his laughter. He had be- 
sides, a quick conscience. The chimes at 
midnight might stir one side of it, but the 
bells of the faith of his fathers as often 
moved the other and the deeper side. 
He had also the restless impulse of his 
race. He had the instinct of action, and 
more than once he cried out, "Oh that 
I had been a soldier!" He was, indeed, a 
man of action, tied by the leg to a sick 
bed. 

No matter how the evanescent critics 
girded at the written thing of this man's 
soul, which was to abide when they and 
their gird were gone, he was happy in the 
possession of the unswervingconfidence of 
^33 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

faithful friends, and these also, "namely" 
people too, who knew well the quality of 
that inwhich they were trusting. He knew, 
of course, that confidence to be the most 
valuable and at the same time the most 
terrible possession of the human heart; for 
what if it one day got its eyes opened, also, 
to the possible truth that what it valued at 
so high an estimate were really fustian 
wind-blown, for a brief day's littleness? 
Their confidence in him, however, proved 
to be correct. Time has justified it. 

His charm was intensely personal. Like 
Burns he possessed an innate distinction 
of personal grace which found expression 
in his words. His beauty of eye, and the 
charm of his face, where expressions and 
feelings were evanescent and pursuant as 
the wind- wave over the wheat, marked him 
out from the common ruck of man. And 
his written style was the natural embodi- 
ment of his personality. 

Stevenson's power of vivid singular 

^34 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

flashlight vision was indeed his very own. 
His whole was apt to consist of a succes- 
sion of individual scenes, revealed in 
splendidly forcible pictature. This is, of 
course, the result of deliberate devotion 
tohis art, the nurture of his gift, the polish- 
ing development of his medium. The issue 
is the unique grace and precision of his 
workmanship. Light, lambent and pure, 
plays about his sentences. His words are 
like flowers and stars. His paragraphs are 
rich tapestries, to pull a single thread from 
which would be to damage the fabric. 
Sometimes his style is as close as that of 
Thucydides. Besides, his genius is as ver- 
satile and various as the moods of his nat- 
ive climate. The novel, the prose-poem, 
the epistle, the parable.above all the essay, 
reflecting aspects of Nature and of the 
soul's lifeand conduct. Hence it is that his 
charm is such as perennially attracts, with 
new phases of freshness on each renewal. 
Yet, while he reveals his heart he does not 
135 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

uncover his nakedness. His confidences 
are clean. He is a gentleman. 

One thing needs to be clearly said, and 
firmly declared. He did not pose as an in- 
valid. He would have liked nothing so 
little as being set up before even an ad- 
miring public, wrapt in a blanket, a band- 
age round his head, and a packet of cough 
drops, duly labelled, on his lap. Himself 
said: "To me the medicine botdes on my 
chimney and the blood on my handker- 
chief are accidents. They do not colour my 
view of life, and I should think myself a 
trifler, and in bad taste, if I introduced the 
world to these unimportant trifles." He 
would hate to have his biography a series 
of bulletins. 

Notwithstanding his experiences with 
health, or rather with the want of it, his 
youth was entirely immortal; his soul 
could do a back somersault into his child- 
hood years. Even with the blood-stained 
handkerchief at his lips he was an optim- 

136 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

ist. No man had a cheerier laugh with 
which to meet his interviews with Death. 
He never Hked to put Death out of count- 
enance by making him feel that he was 
an unwelcome caller. Yet, Death himself 
must often have felt awkward in the cham- 
ber of such a man. Tears were near his 
laughter too. A curious pixie lived in hid- 
ing-holes of his heart. His soul was an 
Ariel. 

His opinion of himself was all the while 
much more modest than that which was 
in the scrap-book of the gods. His name 
is still one for leaded type. There is a 
sheen of its own about it. He had, in him- 
self, and in his character, a familiar per- 
sonal power to interest, to attach, and to 
charm. He was an attractive inspiration, for 
he possessed in rare degree what appeals 
to universal and primitive sources of racial 
imagination. His genius was by nature 
fastidious and artistically modelled. His 
work in general has many master-touches 
137 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

of inner revelation. The keys of the soul 
are touched with master hand in the de- 
lineation of his characters. His work is 
truest literature, master-piecesof thought, 
moulded on the deepest feelings of the 
universal heart. 

The world's verdict on his work has 
modified its early utterances in the direc- 
tion of extended praise and deepening 
appreciation. Sir John Millais knew what 
he was sayingwhen he declared, " Nobody 
living can see with such an eye as that 
fellow, and nobody is such a master of his 
tools." 

Sometimes he reveals the inner char- 
acter of a man by a flash upon its integu- 
ment. Thus, how vividly one can see 
Markheim, as in a verbal cartoon, with 
"the haggard lift of his upper lip through 
which his teeth looked out." Or you find 
his scorn for the mock religious hypocrite, 
admirably touched into the concrete, in 
his picture of Tod Lapraik — "a muckle 

138 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

fat white hash of a man like creish, wi' a 
kind of a holy smile that gar'd me scun- 
ner." 

There always was a coterie of know- 
ledge who were convinced of his true artis- 
try. Himself knew all the while, too, what 
he was seeking. He was extremely sensi- 
tive to phrase. To a friend he says: 

'T hope you don't dislike reading bad 
style like this as much as I do writing it; 
it hurts me when neither words nor clauses 
fall into their places, much as it would 
hurt you to sing when you had a bad cold 
and your voice deceived you, and missed 
every other note." 

He was, as we have seen, only too ready 
to attribute the source of his excellencies 
to others, for he was poor, and his soul was 
like a shallop tumbling in the trough of 
great dark waves, in which he had fre- 
quent doubt of himself. "I have given 
up all hope," he writes, "all fancy rather, 
of making literature my hold; I see that 
139 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

I have not capacity enough." It sounds 
strange to us to-day! 

He was blamed and censured for being 
an egotist; but his egotism had the charm- 
ing innocence of a child's about it. The 
world that entered by his eyes flowed 
through his heart into utterance. There is 
a Scoto-Frenchness in many of his emo- 
tions, as when he writes: 

"The first violet. ... I do not think so 
small a thing has ever given me such a 
princely festival of pleasure. I feel as if my 
heart were a little bunch of violets in my 
bosom; and my brain is pleasantly intox- 
icated with the wonderful odour. ... It is 
like a wind blowing to one out of fairy- 
land." 

In fact, this kind of egotism is the 
ground root of the essayist's labour. The 
world is going on round about him, big 
and noisy; but the essayist, instinctively 
and by right of his egotism, button-holes 
the world, and leads it into a side place, 

140 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

especially to a place, if possible, penetrated 
by the sound of running water. He says 
in effect what Stevenson says in fact: "I 
cannot write in any sense of the word, but 
I am as happy as can be, and I wish to 
notify the fact before it passes." 

He loved the children, and nothing 
delighted him more than to share in the 
creation of sport for them. Childlike also 
was his love of appreciation. It was with- 
held from him long enough, and when it 
did come in little preliminary drops into 
his heart it was received with real grat- 
itude. He appreciated above everything 
the approval of common people, for the 
truest critic, after all, is the common uni- 
versal man. He liked to receive criticism, 
but certain criticisms annoyed him, espec- 
ially when he is "down in health, wealth, 
and fortune." He begs Henley, "Never, 
please, delay such confidences any more. 
If they come quickly they are a help, if 
they come after long silences they feel 
141 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

almost like a taunt." 

He resistantly wriggles under certain 
forms of stricture. But he has confidence 
in thevision and the impulsewhichmaster- 
fully impel him to write. "I do not care," 
he says. "There is something in meworth 
saying, though I cannot find what it is just 
yet; and, ere I die, if I do not die too fast, 
I shall write something worth the boards, 
which with scarce an exception I have not 
yet done." Yet he had written, A Lodging 
for the Night, the best picture of sixteenth- 
century Paris with Frangois Villon in it, 
that could be done by any man living or 
dead, with Will d the Mill, and Providence 
and the Guitar! 

He was not good at making a mercenary 
bargain, hence he experienced the trad- 
itional anxieties of the poverty of authors. 
He touched cash arrangements gingerly 
with a shrinking finger. 

'T hate myself for being always on 
business. But I cannot help my fears, 

142 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

anxieties about money Now I am fight- 
ing with both hands a hard battle, and my 
work, while it will be as good as I can 
make it, will probablybe worth twopence." 
How blind is genius always to investment 
potencies. How hunger hinders the calcul- 
ation of profits while only provoking the 
"liberty of prophesying"! 

And now he needs to ask for nothing. 
Time is giving him, every passing day, a 
more abiding reward. Wheresoever he did 
a day's thinking, writing or suffering, has 
become a place to be remembered. And 
no place, except that hill-top where his 
dust lies sleeping, is more transfused with 
the remembrance of his spirit than the 
grey streets of Edinburgh, and the quiet 
"Hills of Home." 



THE PENTLAND ESSAYS 



PENTLAND ESSAY 
NUMBER ONE 



PASTORAL PENTLAND ESSAY 

NUMBER ONE 

TO LEAVE HOME IN 
early life is to be stunned 
and quickened with novel- 
ties ; but when years have 
come, it only casts a more endearing light 
upon the past. As in those composite 
photographs of Mr Galton's, the image 
of each new sitter brings out but the more 
clearly the central features of the race ; 
when once youth has flown, each new 
impression only deepens the sense of na- 
tionality and the desire of native places. 
So may some cadet of Royal Ecossais or 
the Albany Regiment, ashemounted guard 
about French citadels, so may some officer 
marching his company of the Scots- Dutch 
among the polders, have felt the soft rains 
of the Hebrides upon his brow, or started 
in the ranks at the remembered aroma of 
peat-smoke. And the rivers of home are 
dear in particular to all men. This is as old 
as Naaman, who was jealous for Abana 
149 



THE HIIJ-S OF HOME 

and Pharpar; it is confined to no race nor 
country, for I know one of Scottish blood 
but a child of Suffolk, whose fancy still lin- 
gers about the lilied lowland waters of that 
shire. But the streams of Scotland are in- 
comparable in themselves — or I am only 
the more Scottish to suppose so — and their 
sound and colourdwell for everin the mem- 
ory. How often and willingly do I not look 
again in fancy on Tummel, or Manor, or 
the talking Airdle, or Dee swirling in its 
Lynn; on the bright burn of Kinnaird, or 
the golden burn that pours and sulks in the 
den behind Kingussie! I think shame to 
leave out one of these enchantresses, but 
the list would grow too long if I remember- 
ed all; only I may not forget Allan Water, 
nor birch-wetting Rogie, nor yet Almond; 
nor, for all its pollutions, that Water of 
Leithofthe many and well-named mills — 
Bell's Mills, and Canon Mills, and Silver 
Mills; nor Redford Burn of pleasant mem- 
ories; nor yet, for all its smallness, that 

150 



PASTORAL 

nameless trickle that springs in the green 
bosom of Allermuir, and is fed from Hal- 
kerside with a perennial teacupful, and 
threads the moss under the Shearer's 
Knowe, and makes one pool there, over- 
hung by a rock, where I loved to sit and 
make bad verses, and is then kidnapped in 
itsinfancy by subterranean pipes fortheser- 
vice of the sea-beholding city in the plain. 
From many points in the moss you may see 
at one glance its whole course and that of 
all its tributaries; the geographer of this 
Lilliput may visit all its corners without 
sittingdown,andnotyetbegintobebreath- 
ed; Shearer's Knowe and Halkerside are 
but names of adjacent cantons on a single 
shoulder of a hill, as names are squandered 
(it would seem to the inexpert, in superflu- 
ity) upon these upland sheepwalks; a buc- 
ket would receive the whole discharge of 
the toy river; it would take in an appreci- 
able time to fill your morning bath; for the 
most part, besides, it soaks unseen through 
151 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

the moss; and yet for the sake of auld lang 
syne, and the figure of a cQvidAn genius loci, 
I am condemned to Hnger awhile in fancy 
by its shores; and if the nymph (whocannot 
be above a span in stature) will but inspire 
my pen, I would gladly carry the reader 
along with me. 

John Tod, when I knew him, was al- 
ready "the oldest herd on the Pentlands," 
and had been all his days faithful to that 
curlew-scattering, sheep-collecting life. 
He remembered the droving days, when 
thedroveroadSjthatnowliegreen and sol- 
itary through the heather, were thronged 
thoroughfares. He had himself often mar- 
ched flocks into England, sleeping on the 
hillsides with his caravan; and by his ac- 
count it was a rough business not without 
danger. The drove roads lay apart from 
habitation; the drovers met in the wilder- 
ness, asto-daythedeep-sea fishers meet off 
the banks in the solitude of the Atlantic; 
and in the one as in the other case rough 

152 




I OHM TOD 



PASTORAL 

habits and first-law were the rule. Crimes 
were committed, sheep filched, and drov- 
ers robbed and beaten; most of which of- 
fences had a moorland burial and were nev- 
er heard of in the courts of justice. John, 
in those days, was at least once attacked, 
— by two men after his watch, — and at 
least once, betrayed by his habitual anger, 
fell under the danger of the law and was 
clapped into some rustic prison-house, the 
doors of which he burst in the night and 
was no more heard of in thatquarter. When 
I knew him, his life had fallen in quieter 
places, and he hadno caresbeyondthedull- 
nessofhisdogs and the inroads of pedestri- 
ans from town. Butfora manof his propen- 
sity to wrath these were enough; he knew 
neither rest nor peace, except by snatches, 
in the grey of the summer morning, and al- 
ready from far up the hill, he would wake the 
"toun" with thesoundofhisshoutings; and 
in the lambing time, his cries were not yet 
silenced late at night. This wrathful voice 
153 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

of a man unseen might be said to haunt that 
quarter of the Pentlands,an audible bogie; 
and no doubt it added to the fear in which 
menstoodof Johnatouchofsomethingleg- 
endary. For my own part, he was at first 
my enemy, and I , in my character of a ram- 
bling boy, his natural abhorrence. It was 
long before I saw him near at hand, know- 
ing him only by some sudden blast of bel- 
lowing from far above, bidding me "c'way 
oot amang the sheep." The quietest reces- 
ses of the hill harboured this ogre; I skulk- 
ed in my favourite wilderness like a Cam- 
eronianof the KillingTime, andJohnTod 
was my Claverhouse, and his dogs my 
questing dragoons. Little by little we drop- 
ped into civilities; hishailat sight of me be- 
gan to have less of the ring of a war-slogan; 
soon, we never met but he produced his 
snuff-box,whichwaswithhim,likethe calu- 
met with the Red Indian, a part of herald- 
ry of peace; and at length, in the ripeness 
of time, we grew to be a pair of friends, and 

^54 



PASTORAL 

when I livedalonein these parts of the win- 
ter, it was a settled thing for John to "give 
me a cry" over the garden wall as he set 
forth upon his evening round, and for me 
to overtake him and bear him company. 

That dread voice of his that shook the 
hills when he was angry, fell in ordinary 
talk very pleasantly upon the ear, with a 
kind of honied, friendly whine, not far off 
singing, that was eminently Scottish. He 
laughed not very often, and when he did, 
with a sudden, loud haw-haw, hearty but 
somehow joyless, like an echo from a rock. 
His face was permanently set and colour- 
ed; ruddy and stiff with weathering; more 
like a picture than a face;yet with a certain 
strain and a threat of latent anger in the 
expression, like that of a man trained too 
fineand harassed with perpetual vigilance. 
He spoke in the richest dialect of Scotch 
I ever heard;the words in themselveswere 
a pleasure and often a surprise to me, so 
that I often came back from one of our pa- 
155 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

trols with new acquisitions; and this voca- 
bulary he wouldhandleHke a master, stalk- 
ing a little beforeme, "beard onshoulder," 
the plaid hanging loosely about him, the 
yellow staff clapped under his arm, and 
guiding me uphill by that devious, tactical 
ascent which seems peculiar to men of his 
trade. I might count him with the best 
talkers; only that talking Scotch and talk- 
ing English seem incomparable acts. He 
touched on nothingatleast, but headorned 
it; when he narrated, the scene was before 
you; when he spoke (as he did mostly) of 
his own antique business, the thing took 
on a colour of romance and curiosity that 
was surprising. The clans of sheep with 
their particular territories on the hill, and 
how, in the yearly killings and purchases, 
each must be proportionally thinned and ' 
strengthened; the midnight busyness of 
animals, the signsof the weather, the cares 
of the snowy season, the exquisite stupi- 
dity of sheep, the exquisite cunningofdogs: 

156 



PASTORAL 

all these he could present so humanly, and 
with so much old experience and living 
gusto, that weariness was excluded. And 
in the midst he would suddenly straighten 
his bowed back, the stick would fly abroad 
in demonstration, and the sharp thunder 
of his voice roll out a long itinerary for the 
dogs, so that you saw at last the use of that 
great wealth of names for every knowe 
and howe upon the hillside; and the dogs, 
having hearkened with lowered tails and 
raised faces, would run up their flags again 
to the masthead and spread themselves 
upon the indicated circuit. It used to fill 
me with wonder how they could follow and 
retain so long a story. But John denied 
these creatures all intelligence; they were 
the constant butt of his passion and con- 
tempt; it wasjust possible to workwith the 
like of them, he said, — not more than pos- 
sible. And then he would expand upon the 
subject of the really good dogs that he had 
known, and the one really good dog that 
157 



\ 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

he had himself possessed. He had been 
offered forty pounds for it; but a good col- 
lie was worth more than that, more than 
anything, to a "herd"; he did the herd's 
work for him. "As for the like of them!" he 
would cry, and scornfully indicate the 
scouring tails of his assistants. 

Once — I translate John's Lallan, for I 
cannot do it justice, being born Britannis 
in montibus, indeed, but alas! inerudito 
scBculo — once, in the days of his good dog, 
he had bought some sheep in Edinburgh, 
and on the way out, the road being crowd- 
ed, two were lost. This was a reproach to 
John, and a slur upon the dog; and both 
were alive to theirmisfortune. Word came, 
after some days, that a farmer about Braid 
had found a pair of sheep;and thitherwent 
John and the dog to ask for restitution. But 
the farmer was a hard man and stood upon 
his rights. "How were they marked?" he 
asked;and since Johnhad boughtrightand 
left from many sellers and had no notion 

158 



PASTORAL 

ofthemarks — "Very well, "said thefarmer, 
"then it's only right that I should keep 
them." — "Well,"said John, "it's a factthat 
I cannae tell the sheep; but if my dog can, 
will ye let me have them?" The farmer 
was honest as well as hard, and besides I 
daresay he had little fear of the ordeal; so 
he had all the sheepupon his farm into one 
largepark,andturned John's doginto their 
midst.Thathairyman ofbusiness knewhis 
errand well; he knew that John and he had 
bought twosheep and(to their shame)lost 
them about Boroughmuirhead; he knew 
besides (the Lord knows how, unless by 
listening) that they were come to Braid for 
their recovery; and without pause or blun- 
der singled out, first one and then another, 
the two waifs. It was that afternoon the 
forty pounds were offered and refused. 
And the shepherd and his dog — what do 
I say? the true shepherd and his man — set 
off together by Fairmilehead in jocund 
humour, and "smiled to ither" all the way 
159 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

home, with the two recovered ones before 
them. So far, so good;but intelligence may 
be abused. The dog, as he is by little man's 
inferior in mind, is only by little his super- 
ior in virtue; and John had another collie 
tale of quite a different complexion. At the 
foot ofthe moss behind Kirk Yetton(Caer 
Ketton, wise men say) there is a scrog of 
low wood and a pool with a dam for wash- 
ing sheep. John was one day lying under 
a bush in the scrog, when he was aware of 
a collie on the far hillside skulking down 
through the deepest of the heather with 
obtrusive stealth. He knew the dog; knew 
him for a clever, rising practitioner from 
quite a distant farm; one whom perhaps 
he had coveted as he saw him masterfully 
steering flocks to market. But whatdid the 
practitionerso far fromhome.-^andwhythis 
guilty and secretmanceuvring towards the 
pool.-* — for it was towards the pool that he 
was heading. John lay the closer under his 
bush, andpresently saw thedogcome forth 

1 60 



PASTORAL 

Upon the margin, look all about him to see 
if he were anywhere observed, plunge in 
and repeatedly wash himselfoverheadand 
ears, and then (but now openly and with 
tail in air) strike homeward over the hills. 
That same night word was sent his mas- 
ter, and the rising practitioner, shaken up 
from where he lay, all innocence, before 
the fire, was had out to a dykeside and 
promptlyshot; for alas! he was that foulest 
of criminals under trust,a sheep-eater;and 
itwas from themaculation of sheep'sblood 
that he had come so far to cleanse himself 
in the pool behind Kirk Yetton. 

A trade that touches nature, one that 
lies at the foundations of life, in which we 
have all had ancestors employed, so that 
on a hint of it ancestral memories revive, 
lends itself to literary use, vocal or written. 
The fortune of a tale lies not alone in the 
skill of him that writes, but as much, per- 
haps, in the inherited experience of him 
who reads; and when I hear with a partic- 
i6i L 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

ular thrill of things that I have never done 
or seen, it is one of that innumerable army 
of my ancestors rejoicing in past deeds. 
Thus novels begin to touch not the fine 
clilettantihMX. the gross mass of mankind, 
when they leave off to speak of parlours 
and shades of manner and still-born nice- 
ties of motive, and begin to deal with fight- 
ing, sailoring, adventure, death or child- 
birth; and thus ancient outdoor crafts and 
occupations,whether Mr Hardy wields the 
shepherd's crook or Count Tolstoi swings 
the scythe, lift romance into a near neigh- 
bourhood with epic. These aged things 
have on them the dew of man's morning; 
they lie near, not so much to us, the semi- 
artificial flowerets, as to the trunk and ab- 
original taproot of the race. A thousand 
interests spring up in the process of the 
ages, and a thousand perish; that is now 
an eccentricity or a lost artwhich was once 
the fashion of an empire; and those only 
areperennial mattersthatrouse us to-day, 

162 



PASTORAL 

and that roused men in all epochs of the 
past. There is a certain critic, not indeed 
of execution but of matter, whom I dare 
be known to set before the best: a certain 
low-browed, hairygentleman, atfirst a per- 
cher in the fork of trees, next (as they re- 
late) a dweller in caves, and whom I think 
I see squatting in cave-mouths, of a plea- 
sant afternoon, to munch his berries — his 
wife, that accomplished lady, squatting by 
hisside:hisname I never heard, butheisof- 
ten described as Probably Arboreal, which 
may serve for recognition. Each has his 
own tree of ancestors, but at the top of all 
sits Probably Arboreal; in all our veins 
there runsomeminimsofhisold, wild, tree- 
top blood; our civilised nerves still tingle 
with his rude terrors and pleasures; and to 
that which wouldhave movedour common 
ancestor, all must obediently thrill. 

We have not so far to climb to come to 
shepherds; and it may be I had one for an 
ascendant who has largely moulded me. 
16:; 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

But yet I think I owe my taste for that hill- 
side business rather to the art and interest 
of John Tod. He it was that made it live 
forme,astheartistcanmakeallthingslive. 
It was through him the simple strategy of 
massing sheepupon a snowy evening, with 
its attendant scampering of earnest, shag- 
gy aides-de-camp, wasanaffairthat I never 
wearied of seeing, and that I never weary 
of recalling to mind: the shadow of the night 
darkening on the hills, inscrutable black 
blotsofsnowshowermovinghereand there 
like night already come, huddles of yellow 
sheep and dartings of black dogs upon the 
snow, abi tter air that took you by the throat, 
unearthly harpings of the wind along the 
moors; and for centre piece to all these fea- 
tures and influences, John winding up the 
brae, keeping his captain's eye upon all 
sides, and breaking, ever and again, into 
a spasm of bellowingthat seemed to make 
the evening bleaker. It is thus that I still 
see him in my mind's eye, perched on a 

164 



PASTORAL 

hump of the declivity not far from Halker- 
side, his staffin airy flourish, his great voice 
taking hold upon the hillsand echoing ter- 
ror to the lowlands; I, meanwhile, standing 
somewhat back, until thefitshould beover, 
and, withapinch of snuff, my friend relapse 
into his easy, even conversation. 




THJB GARDEN— SWANS ION COITACr. 

In flowers his. taste was otd-f?5hioncd iiu.l catholiv 



PENTLAND ESSAY 
NUMBER TWO 



AN OLD SCOTCH GARDENER 
PENTLAND ESSAY TWO 

BY ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

I THINK I MIGHT ALMOST 
havesaidthelastrsomewhere, indeed, 
in the uttermost glens of the Lamm- 
ermuir or among the south-western 
hills there may yet linger a decrepid repre- 
sentative of this bygone good fellowship; 
but as far as actual experience goes, I have 
only met onemaninmylifewho might fitly 
be quoted in the same breath with Andrew 
Fairservice, — though without his vices. 
He was a man whose very presence could 
impart a savour of quaint antiquity to the 
baldest and most modern flower-pots. 
There was a dignityabout histall stooping 
form, and an earnestness in his wrinkled 
face that recalled Don Quixote; but a Don 
Quixote who had come through the train- 
ing of the Covenant, and been nourished 
in his youth on Walker s Lives and The 
Hindlet Loose. 

Now.aslcouldnotbeartoletsuchaman 
171 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

pass away with no sketch preserved of his 
old-fashioned virtues, I hope the reader 
will take this as an excuse for the present 
paper, and judge as kindly as he can the in- 
firmities of my description. To me, whofind 
it so difficult to tell the little that I know, 
he stands essentially as di genius loci. It is 
impossible to separate his spare form and 
old straw hat from the garden in the lap of 
the hill, with its rocks overgrown with cle- 
matis, its shadowy walks, and the splendid 
breadth of champaign that one saw from 
the north-west corner. The garden and 
gardener seem part and parcel of each ot- 
her. When I take him from his right sur- 
roundings and try to make him appear for 
me on paper, he looks unreal and phantas- 
mal ; the best that I can say may convey 
some notion to those that never saw him, 
but to me it will be ever impotent. 

The first time that I saw him, I fancy 
Robert was pretty old already: he had cer- 
tainly begun to use his years as a stalking 

172 



OLD SCOTCH GARDENER 

horse. Latterly he was beyond all the im- 
pudenciesof logic, considering a reference 
to the parish registerworth all the reasons 
in the world. "/ am old and well stricken 
in years',' he was wont to say; and I never 
found any one bold enough to answer the 
argument. Apart from this vantage that he 
kept over all who were not yet octogenar- 
ian, he had some other drawbacks as a gar- 
dener. He shrank the very place he culti- 
vated. The dignity and reduced gentility 
of his appearance made the small garden 
cut a sorry figure. He was full of tales of 
greater situations in his younger days. He 
spokeof castlesand parkswith a humbling 
familiarity. He told of places where un- 
der-gardeners had trembled at his looks, 
where there were meres and swanneries, 
labyrinths of walk and wildernesses of sad 
shrubbery in his control, till you could not 
helpfeelingthatitwascondescensiononhis 
part to dress your humbler garden plots. 
Youwere thrown atonce intoan invidious 
^11 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

position. You felt that you were profiting 
by the needs of dignity, and that his poverty 
and not his will consented to your vulgar 
rule. Involuntarily you compared yourself 
with the swineherd that made Alfred watch 
hiscakes, orsome bloated citizen who may 
have given hissons and hiscondescension 
to the fallen Dionysius. Nor were the dis- 
agreeables purely fanciful and metaphys- 
ical, for the sway that he exercised over 
your feelings he extended to your garden, 
and, through the garden, to your diet. He 
would trim a hedge, throw away a favourite 
plant, or fill the most favoured and fertile 
section of thegarden with a vegetable that 
none of us could eat, in supreme contempt 
for our opinion. If you asked him to send 
you in one of your own artichokes, ''That 
I wull, mem,'' he would say, ''with pleas- 
ure, for it is mair blessed to give than to re- 
ceive!' Ay, and even when, by extra twist- 
ing of the screw, we prevailed on him to 
prefer our commands to his own inclina- 

174 



OLD SCOTCH GARDENER 

tion, and he went away, stately and sad, 
^roiessmgXhdiV'ourwtdl was kzs pleastire,'' 
but yet reminding us that he would do it 
''withfeelins" — even then, I say, the tri- 
umphant master felt humbled in his tri- 
umph, felt that he ruled on sufferance only, 
that he was taking a mean advantage of 
the other's low estate, and that the whole 
scene had been one of those " slights that 
patient merit of the unworthy takes." 

In flowers his taste was old-fashioned 
andcatholic;affecting sunflowers and dah- 
lias, wallflowers and roses, and holding in 
supreme aversion whatsoever was fantas- 
tic, new-fashioned or wild. There was one 
exception tothis sweeping ban. Foxgloves, 
though undoubtedly guilty on the last 
count, he not only spared, but loved; and 
when the shubbery was being thinned, he 
stayed his hand and dexterously manipul- 
ated his bill in order to save every stately 
stem. Inboyhood,ashetoldmeonce,speak- 
ing in that tonethatonly actors andtheold- 
^75 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

fashioned common folk can use nowadays, 
his heart grew ''proud'' within him when 
he came ona burn-course among the braes 
of Manor that shone purple with their 
graceful trophies; and not all his apprent- 
iceship and practice for so many years of 
precisegardeninghad banished theseboy- 
ish recollections from his heart. Indeed, he 
was a man keenlyalive to the beauty of all 
that was bygone. He abounded in old stor- 
ies of his boyhood, and kept pious account 
of all his former pleasures; and when he 
went (onaholiday)tovisit one of the fabled 
great places of the earth where he had 
served before, he came back full of little 
pre-Raphaelite reminiscences that show- 
ed real passion for the past, such as might 
have shaken hands with Hazlitt or Jean- 
Jacques. 

But however his sympathy with his old 
feelings might affect his liking for the fox- 
gloves, the very truth was that he scorned 
all flowers together. They were but gar- 

176 



OLD SCOTCH GARDENER 

nishings, childish toys, trifling ornaments 
forladies' chimney-shelves. Itwas towards 
his cauliflowers andpeas andcabbage that 
his heart grew warm. H is preference for the 
more useful growths was such that cab- 
bages werefoundinvadingthe flower-pots, 
andanoutpostofsavoyswasoncediscover- 
ed in the centre of the lawn. Hewould pre- 
lectover some thriving plant with wonder- 
ful enthusiasm, piling reminiscence on re- 
miniscence of former and perhaps yet fin- 
er specimens. Yet even then he did not let 
the credit leave himself He had, indeed, 
raised ''finer o' them'; but it seemed that 
no one else had been favoured with a like 
success. All other gardeners, in fact, were 
mere foils to his own superior attainments; 
and he would recount, with perfect sober- 
nessof voice and visage, howso and so had 
wondered, and such another could scarce- 
ly give credit to his eyes. Nor was it with 
his rivals only that he parted praise and 
blame. If you remarked how well a plant 

177 M 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

was looking, he would gravely touch his 
hat and thank you with solemn unction; 
all credit in the matter falling to him. If, on 
the other hand, you called his attention to 
some back -going vegetable, he would 
quote Scripture: ''Paul may plant andAp- 
ollos may water'; all blame being left to 
Providence, on the score of deficient rain 
or untimely frosts. 

There was one thing in the garden that 
shared his preference with his favourite 
cabbages and rhubarb, and that other was 
the beehive. Their sound, their industry, 
perhaps their sweet productalso,hadtaken 
hold of his imaginationand heart, whether 
by way of memory or no I cannot say, al- 
though perhaps the bees too were linked 
tohimbysome recollectionof Manorbraes 
and his country childhood. Nevertheless, 
he was too chary of his personal safety or 
(let me rather say) his personal dignity to 
mingle in any active office towards them. 
But hecould stand by whileoneof the con- 

178 



OLD SCOTCH GARDENER 

temned rivals did the work for him, and 
protest that itwas quite safe in spite of his 
own considerate distance and the cries of 
the distressed assistant. In regard to bees, 
hewasrathera man of word than deed, and 
someof hismoststriking sentenceshad the 
bees for text. ' ' They are indeed wonderfu 
creatures, meni^' he said once. " They just 
mind me d what the Queen of Sheba said 
to Solomon — and I think she said it wi a 
sigh, — ' 7^ he half of it hath not deen told un- 
to me. ' " 

As far as the Bible goes, he was deeply 
read, like the old Covenanters, of whom he 
was the worthy representative, his mouth 
wasfullofsacredquotations;itwasthebook 
that he had studied most and thought up- 
on most deeply. To many people in his sta- 
tion the Bible, and perhaps Burns, are the 
only books of any vital literary merit that 
they read, feeding themselves, for the rest, 
on the draff of country newspapers, and the 
very instructive but not very palatable pa- 
179 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

bulum of some cheap educational series. 
This was Robert's position. All day long 
he haddreamedof the Hebrew stories, and 
his head had been full of Hebrew poetry 
and Gospel ethics; until they had struck 
deep root into his heart, and the very ex- 
pressions had become a par t of him ; so that 
herarely spoke withoutsomeantique idiom 
or Scripture mannerism that gave a raci- 
ness to the merest trivialities of talk. But 
the influence of the Bible did not stop here. 
There was more in Robert than quaint 
phrase and ready store of reference. He 
was imbuedwith a spirit of peaceand love: 
he interposed between man and wife: he 
threwhimself between the angry, touching 
his hat the while with all the ceremony of 
an usher : he protected the birds from every 
bodybut himself, seeing, I suppose, a great 
difference between official execution and 
wanton sport. His mistresstelling him one 
day to put some ferns into his master's par- 
ticular corner, and adding, "Though, in- 

i8o 



OLD SCOTCH GARDENER 

deed, Robert, he doesn't deserve them, for 
he wouldn't help me to gather them," ''Eh 
menty' replies Robert, '' btit I wouldnae say 
that, for I think he s just a most deservin 
gentleman. " Again, two of our friends, who 
were onintimate terms, andaccustomed to 
use language to each other, somewhat with - 
out the bounds of the parliamentary, hap- 
pened to differ about the position of a seat 
in he garden. The discussion, as was usual 
when these two were at it, soon waxed tol- 
erably insulting on both sides. Every one 
accustomed to such controversies several 
timesa day was quietlyenjoying thisprize- 
fight of somewhat abusive wit — everyone 
but Robert, to whom the perfectgood faith 
of the whole quarrel seemed unquestion- 
able, and who, after having waited till his 
conscience would suffer him to wait no 
more, and till he expected every moment 
that the disputants would fall to blows, cut 
suddenlyin with tonesof almosttearfulen- 
treaty: ''Eh, but, gentlemen, I ivadhaenae 
i8i 



.jv : ^m ' j! 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

mazrwordsado2t^tL^"Onet\\ingwa.snotice- 
able about Robert'sreligion: itwas neither 
dogmatic nor sectarian. He never expati- 
ated (at least, in my hearing) on the doct- 
rines of his creed, and he never condemn- 
ed anybody else. I have no doubt that he 
held all Roman Catholics, Atheists, and 
Mahometans as considerably out of it; I 
don't believe hehad any sympathy for Pre- 
lacy; and the natural feelings of man must 
have made him a little sore about Free- 
Churchism; but at least, he never talked 
about these views, never grew controver- 
sially noisy, and never openly aspersed the 
belief or practice of anybody. Now all this 
is not generally characteristic of Scotch 
piety; Scotch sects beingchurches militant 
with a vengeance, and Scotch believers 
perpetual crusaders the one against the ot- 
her, and missionaries the one to the other. 
Perhaps Robert's originally tender heart 
was what made the difference; or, perhaps, 
his solitary and pleasant labour among 



OLD SCOTCH GARDENER 

fruits and flowers had taught him a more 
sunshiny creed than those whose work is 
among the tares of fallen humanity; and 
the soft influencesof thegarden had enter- 
ed deep into his spirit, 

" Annihilating all that's made 
To a green thought in a green shade." 

But I could go on for ever chronicling 
his golden sayings or telling of his inno- 
cent and living piety. I had meant to tell 
of his cottage with the German pipe hung 
reverently above the fire, and the shell box 
that he had made for his son, and of which 
he would say pathetically: ''He was real 
pleased wi it at first, but I think he s got a 
kind d tired d it now'' — the son being then 
a man of about forty. But I will let all these 
pass. "'Tis more significant: he's dead." 
The earth, that he had digged so much in 
his life, was dug out by another for himself; 
and the flowers that he had tended drew 
their life still from him, but in a new and 
nearer way. A bird flew about the open 

183 



liif^i*i^iv •'*-:,; 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

grave as if it too wished to honour the ob- 
sequies of one who had so often quoted 
Scripture in favour of its kind: "Are not 
two sparrows sold for one farthing, and yet 
not one of them falleth to the ground." 

Yes, he is dead. But the kings did not 
rise in the place of death to greet him "with 
taunting proverbs" as they rose to greet 
the haughty Babylonian; for in his life he 

was lowly, and a peacemaker and a 
servant of God. 




TFIE MANSH 



THE MANSE PENTLAND ESSAY 
NUMBER THREE 

I HAVE NAMED, AMONG 
many rivers that make music in my 
memory, that dirty Water of Leith. 
Often and often I desire to look upon 
it again ; and the choice of a point of view is 
easy to me. It should be at a certain water- 
door, embowered in shrubbery. The river 
is there dammed back for the service of 
the flour-mill just below, so that it lies 
deep and darkling, and the sand slopes 
into brown obscurity with a glint of gold, 
and it has but newly been recruited by the 
borrowings of the snuff-mill just above, 
and these, tumbling merrily in, shake the 
pool to its black heart, fill it with drowsy 
eddies, and set the curded froth of many 
other mills solemnly steering to and fro 
upon the surface. Or so it was when I was 
young; for change, and the masons, and 
the pruning-knife, have been busy; and if 
I could hope to repeat a cherished experi- 
ence, it must be on many and impossible 
189 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

conditions. I must choose, as well as the 
point of view, a certain moment in my 
growth, so that the scale may be exagger- 
ated, and the trees on the steep opposite 
side may seem to climb to heaven, and the 
sand by the water-door, where I am stand- 
ing, seem as low as Styx. And I must 
choose the season also, so that the valley 
may be brimmed like a cup with sunshine 
and the songs of birds; — and the year of 
grace, so that when I turn to leave the 
riverside I may find the old manse and its 
inhabitants unchanged. 

It was a place in that time like no other: 
the garden cut into provinces by a great 
hedge of beech, and overlooked by the 
church and the terrace of the churchyard, 
where the tombstones were thick, and af- 
ter nightfall " spunkies " might be seen to 
dance at least by children; flower-plots ly- 
ing warm in sunshine; laurels and the 
great yew making elsewhere a pleasing 
horror of shade; the smell of water rising 

190 



THE MANSE 

from all round, with an added tang of 
paper-mills; the sound of water every- 
where, and the sound of mills — the wheel 
and the dam singing their alternate strain; 
the birds on every bush and from every 
corner of the overhanging woods pealing 
out their notes until the air throbbed with 
them; and in the midst of this, the manse. 
I see it, by the standard of my childish 
stature, as a great and roomy house. In 
truth, it was not so large as I supposed, 
nor yet so convenient, and, standing where 
it did, it is difficult to suppose that it was 
healthful. Yet a large family of stalwart 
sons and tall daughters were housed and 
reared, and came to man and womanhood 
in that nest of little chambers; so that the 
face of the earth was peppered with the 
children of the manse, and letters with out- 
landish stamps became familiar to the 
local postman, and the walls of the little 
chambers brightened with the wonders of 
the East. The dullest could see this was a 
191 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

house that had a pair of hands in divers 
foreign places: a well-beloved house — its 
image fondly dwelt on by many travellers. 
Here lived an ancestor of mine, who 
was a herd of men. I read him, judging 
with older criticism the report of childish 
observation, as a man of singular simpli- 
city of nature; unemotional, and hating 
the display of what he felt; standing con- 
tented on the old ways; a lover of his life 
and innocent habits to the end. We chil- 
dren admired him: partly for his beautiful 
face and silver hair, for none more than 
children are concerned for beauty and, 
above all, for beauty in the old; partly for 
the solemn light in which we beheld him 
once a week, the observed of all observers, 
in the pulpit. But his strictness and dis- 
tance, the effect, I now fancy, of old age, 
slow blood, and settled habit, oppressed 
us with a kind of terror. When not abroad, 
he sat much alone, writing sermons or let- 
ters to his scattered family in a dark and 

192 



THE MANSE 

cold room with a library of bloodless books 
— or so they seemed in those days, al- 
though I have some of them now on my 
own shelves and like well enough to read 
them;andtheselonely hours wrapped him 
in the greater gloom for our imaginations. 
But the study had a redeeming grace in 
many Indian pictures, gaudily coloured 
and dear to young eyes. I cannot depict 
(for I have no such passions now) the 
greed with which I beheld them; and when 
I was once sent in to say a psalm to my 
grandfather, I went, quaking indeed with 
fear, but at the same time glowing with 
hope that, if I said it well, he might reward 
me with an Indian picture. 

"Thy foot He'll not let slide, nor will 
He slumber that thee keeps," 

it ran: a strange conglomerate of the un- 
pronounceable, a sad model to set in child- 
hood before one who was himself to be a 
versifier, and a task in recitation that real- 
ly merited reward. And I must suppose 
193 N 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

the old man thought so too, and was either 
touched or amused by the performance; for 
he took me in his arms with most unwonted 
tenderness, and kissed me, and gave me a 
Httle kindly sermon for my psalm; so that, 
for that day, we were clerk and parson. I 
was struck by this reception into so tender 
a surprise that I forgot mydisappointment. 
And indeed the hope was one of those that 
childhood forges for a pastime, and with 
no design upon reality. Nothing was more 
unlikely than that my grandfather should 
strip himself of one of those pictures, love- 
gifts and reminders of his absent sons; no- 
thing more unlikely than that he should 
bestow it upon me. He had no idea of spoil- 
ing children, leaving all that to my aunt; 
he had fared hard himself, and blubbered 
under the rod in the last century; and his 
ways were still Spartan for the young. The 
last word I heard upon his lips was in this 
Spartan key. He had over- walked in the 
teeth of an east wind, and was now near the 

194 



THE MANSE 

end of his many days. He sat by the dining- 
room fire, with his white hair, pale face and 
bloodshot eyes, a somewhat awful figure; 
and my aunt had given him a dose of our 
good old Scotch medicine, Dr Gregory's 
powder. Now that remedy, as the work of 
a near kinsman of Rob Roy himself, may 
have a savour of romance for the imagina- 
tion; but it comes uncouthly to the palate. 
The old gentleman had taken it with a wry 
face; and that being accomplished, sat with 
perfect simplicity, like a child's, munching 
a " barley-sugar kiss." But when my aunt, 
having the canister open in her hands, pro- 
posed to let me share in the sweets, he in- 
terfered at once. I had no Gregory; then I 
should have no barley-sugar kiss: so he 
decided with a touch of irritation. And 
just then the phaeton coming opportune- 
ly to the kitchen door — for such was our 
unlordly fashion — I was taken for the 
last time from the presence of my grand- 
father. 
195 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

Now I often wonder what I have inherit- 
ed from this old minister. I must suppose, 
indeed, that he was fond of preaching ser- 
mons, and so am I, though I never heard 
itmaintainedthateitherof us loved to hear 
them. He sought health in his youth in the 
Isle of Wight, and I have sought it in both 
hemispheres; but whereas he found and 
kept it, I am still on the quest. He was a 
great lover of Shakespeare, whom he read 
aloud, I have been told, with taste; well, I 
love my Shakespeare also, and am per- 
suaded I can read him well, though I own 
I never have been told so. He made em- 
broidery, designing his own patterns; and 
in that kindof work I never made anything 
but a kettle-holder in Berlin wool, and an 
odd garter of knitting, which was as black 
as the chimney before 1 had done with it. 
Heloved port, and nuts, and porter; and so 
do I, but they agreed better with my grand- 
father, which seems to me a breach of con- 
tract. He had chalk-stones in his fingers; 

196 



THE MANSE 

and these, in good time, I may possibly in- 
herit, but I would much rather have inherit- 
ed his noble presence. Try as I please, I 
cannot join myself with the reverend doc- 
tor; and all the while, no doubt, and even 
as I write thephrase,he moves in my blood, 
and whispers words to me,andsits efficient 
in theveryknot and centre of my being. In 
his garden, as I played there, I learned the 
loveof mills — orhad I anancestor a miller? 
— and a kindness for the neighbourhood of 
graves, as homely things not without their 
poetry — orhad I an ancestor sexton? But 
what of the garden where he played him- 
self? — forthat, too, was the sceneofmy edu- 
cation. Some part of me played therein the 
eighteenth century, andran races underthe 
green avenue at Pilrig; some part of me 
trudged up Leith Walk, which was still a 
country place, and sat on the High School 
benches, and was thrashed, perhaps, by Dr 
Adam. The housewhere I spent my youth 
was not yet thought upon; but we made 
197 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

holiday parties among the cornfields on its 
site, and ate strawberries and cream near 
by at a gardener's. All this I had forgotten; 
onlymygrandfatherrememberedandonce 
reminded me. I have forgotten, too, how 
we grew up, and took orders, and went to 
our first Ayrshire parish, and fell in love 
with and married a daughterof Burns's Dr 
Smith — "Smith opens out his cauld har- 
angues." I have forgotten, but I was there 
all the same, and heard stories of Burns at 
first hand. 

And there is a thing stranger than all 
that; for this homunculus or part-man of 
mine that walked about the eighteenth 
century with Dr Balfour in his youth, was 
in the way of meeting other hornunculos 
or part-men, in the persons of myotheran- 
cestors. These were of a lower order, and 
doubtless we looked down upon them duly. 
But as I went to college with Dr Balfour, 
I may have seen the lamp and oil man tak- 
ing down the shutters from his shop beside 

198 



THE MANSE 

the Tron; — we may have had a rabbit- 
hutch or a book-shelf made for us by a cer- 
tain carpenter in I know not what wynd 
of the old, smoky city; or, upon some holi- 
day excursion, we may have looked into 
the windows of a cottage in a flower-garden 
and seen a certain weaver plying his shut- 
tle. And these were all kinsmen of mine 
upon the other side; and from the eyes of 
thelampandoil man one-half of my unborn 
father, and one-quarter of myself, looked 
out upon us as we went by to college. No- 
thing of all this would cross the mindof the 
young student, as hepostedupthe Bridges 
with trim, stockinged legs, in that city of 
cocked hats and good Scotch still unadul- 
terated. It would not cross his mind that 
he should have a daughter; and the lamp 
and oil man, just then beginning, by a not 
unnatural metastasis, tobloom intoa light- 
house-engineer, should have a grandson; 
and that these two, in the fulness of time, 
should wed; and some portion of that stu- 
199 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

dent himself should survive yet a year or 
two longer in the person of their child. 

Butourancestraladventuresare beyond 
even the arithmetic of fancy; and it is the 
chief recommendation of long pedigrees, 
that we can follow backward the careers of 
our komunculos3ind be reminded of our an- 
tenatal lives. Our conscious years are buta 
moment in the history of the elements that 
build us. Are you a bank-clerk, and do you 
liveat PeckhamPItwasnotalwaysso.And 
though to-day I am only a man of letters, 
either tradition errs or I was present when 
there landed at St Andrews a French bar- 
ber-surgeon, to tend the health and the 
beard of thegreat Cardinal Beaton;! have 
shakenaspearin the Debateable Landand 
shouted thesloganof the Elliots; I waspre- 
sent when a skipper, plying from Dundee, 
smuggled J acobites to France after the '15; 
I was in a West India merchant's office, 
perhaps nextdoor to Bailie Nicol Jarvie's, 
and managed the business of a plantation 

200 



THE MANSE 

in St Kitt's; I was with my engineer-grand- 
father (the son-in-law of the lamp and oil 
man) when he sailed north about Scotland 
on the famous cruise that gave us the /^^V- 
^/^ and the Lor dof the Isles; I was with him, 
too, on the Bell Rock, in the fog, when the 
Smeaton had drifted from her moorings, 
and the Aberdeen men, pick in hand, had 
seized upon the only boats, and he must 
stoop and lap sea-water before his tongue 
could utter audible words; and once more 
with him when the Bell Rock beacon took 
a "thrawe," and his workmen fled into the 
tower, then nearly finished, and he sat un- 
moved reading in his Bible — or affecting 
to read — till one after another slunk back 
with confusion of countenance to their en- 
gineer. Yes, parts of me have seen life, and 
met adventures, and sometimes met them 
well. And away in the still cloudier past, 
the threads that make me up can be traced 
by fancy into the bosoms of thousands and 
millions of ascendants: Picts who rallied 

20I 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

round Macbeth and the old (and highly 
preferable) system of descent by females, 
fleers from before the legions of Agricola, 
marchers in Pannonian morasses, star-gaz- 
ers on Chaldaean plateaus; and, furthest of 
all, what face isthisthat fancy can seepeer- 
ing through thedisparted branches? What 
sleeper in green tree-tops, what muncher 
of nuts, concludes my pedigree? Probably 
arboreal in his habits. . . . 

And I know not which is the more 
strange, that I should carry about with me 
some fibres of my minister-grandfather; or 
that in him, as he sat in his cool study, grave, 
reverend, contented gentleman, there was 
an aboriginal frisking of the blood that was 
not his; tree-top memories, like undevel- 
oped negatives, lay dormant in his mind; 
tree-top instincts awoke and were trod 
down; and Probably Arboreal (scarce to 
be distinguished from a monkey) gamboll- 
ed and chattered in the brain of 
the old divine. 

202 



PENTLAND ESSAY 
NUMBER FOUR 



THE PENTLAND RISING A PAGE 
OF HISTORY 1666 

PENTLAND ESSAY NUMBER FOUR 



I THE CAUSES OF THE REVOLT 



THE PENTLAND RISING A PAGE 
OF HISTORY 1666 

PENTLAND ESSAY NUMBER FOUR 

I THE CAUSES OF THE REVOLT 

TWO HUNDRED YEARS 
ago a tragedy was enacted in 
Scotland, the memory where- 
of has been in great measure 
lost or obscured by the deep tragedies 
which followed it. It is, as it were, the even- 
ing of the night of persecution — a sort of 
twilight, dark indeed to us, but light as the 
noonday when compared with the mid- 
night gloom which followed. This fact, of 
its being the very threshold of persecution, 
lends it, however, an additional interest. 

The prejudices of the people against 
Episcopacy were "out of measure in- 
creased," says Bishop Burnet, "by the 
new incumbents who were put in the place 
of the ejected preachers, and were gener- 
ally very mean and despicable in all re" 
spects. They were the worst preachers I 
ever heard; they were ignorant to a re- 
211 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

preach; and many of them were openly 
vicious. They were indeed the dregs and 
refuseof the northernparts, Thoseof them 
whoarose abovecontempt or scandal were 
men of such violent tempers that they 
were as muchhated as the others were de- 
spised."* It was little to be wondered at, 
from this account, that the country-folk 
refused to go to the parish church, and 
chose rather to listen to outed ministers 
in the fields. But this was not tobe allowed, 
and their persecutors at last fell on the 
methodofcalling a roll of the parishioners' 
names every Sabbath, and marking a fine 
of twenty shillings Scots to the name of 
each absenter. In this way very large 
debts were incurred bypersons altogether 
unable to pay. Besides this, landlords were 
fined for their tenants' absences, tenants 
for their landlords, masters for their serv- 
ants, servants for their masters, even 

* History of My Own Times^ beginning 1660, by 
Bishop Gilbert, p. 158. 

212 



CAUSES OF THE RE\^OLT 

though in theirattendance they themselves 
were perfectly regular. And as the cur- 
ates were allowed to fine with the sanct- 
ion of any common soldier, it may be im- 
agined that often the pretexts were neither 
very sufficient nor well proven. 

When the fines could not be paid at 
once, Bibles, clothes, and household uten- 
sils were seized upon, or a number of 
soldiers, proportionate to his wealth, were 
quartered on the offender. The coarse and 
drunken privates filled the houses with 
woe; snatched the bread from the children 
to feed their dogs; shocked the principles, 
scorned the scruples, and blasphemed the 
religion of their humble hosts; and when 
they had reduced them to destitution, sold 
the furniture, and burned down the roof- 
tree which was consecrated to the peas- 
ants by the name of Home. For all this 
attention each of these soldiers received 
from his unwilling landlord a certain sum 
ofmoneyperday — three shillings sterling, 
213 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

according to ''Naphtali" And frequently 
they were forced to payquartering money 
for more men than were in reaHty "cess- 
ed"on them. At that time it was no strange 
thing to behold a strong man begging 
for money to pay his fines, and many 
others who were deep in arrears, or who 
had attracted attention in some otherway, 
were forced to flee from their homes, and 
take refuge from arrest and imprisonment 
among the wild mosses of the uplands.* 
One example in particular we may cite: 
John Neilson, the Laird of Corsack, a 
worthy man, was, unfortunately for him- 
self, a Nonconformist. First he was fined 
in four hundred pounds Scots, and then 
through cessing he lost nineteen hundred 
and ninety-three pounds Scots. He was 
next obliged to leave his house and flee 
from place to place, during which wander- 
ings he lost his horse. His wife and child- 
ren were turned out of doors, and then his 

*Wodrow's Church History^ Book II. chap. i. sect. i. 

214 



CAUSES OF THE REVOLT 

tenantswere fined till they too were almost 
ruined. As a final stroke, they drove away 
all his cattle to Glasgow and sold them.* 
Surely it was time that something were 
done to alleviate so much sorrow, to over- 
throw such tyranny. 

About this time too there arrived in 
Gallowaya person calling himself Captain 
Andrew Gray, and advising the people to 
revolt. He displayed some documents 
purporting to be from the northern Coven- 
anters, and stating that they were pre- 
pared to join in any enterprise commenced 
by their southern brethren. The leader of 
the persecutors was Sir James Turner, an 
officer afterwards degraded for his share 
in the matter. "He was naturally fierce, 
but was mad when he was drunk, and that 
was very often," said Bishop Burnet. "He 
was a learned man, but had always been in 
armies, and knew no other rule but to obey 
orders. He told me he had no regard to any 

*Cruikshank's Church History^ I75i, 2nd edit.p. 202. 
215 



THE HILr,S OF HOME 

law, but acted, as he was commanded, in a 
military way."* 

This was the state of matters, when an 
outrage was committed which gave spirit 
and determination to the oppressed coun- 
trymen, lit the flame of insubordination, 
and for the time at least recoiled on those 
who perpetrated it with redoubled force. 

* Burnet, p. 348. 



II THE BEGINNING 



I love no warres, 
I loveno jarres, 

Nor strife's fire. 
May discord cease, 
Let's live in peace: 

This I desire. 

If it must be 
Warre we must see 

(So fates conspire), 
May we not feel 
The force of steel: 

This I desire. 

T. Jackson, 1651. 



* Fuller's Historic of the Holy Warre ^ 4th edit. 1651. 



II THE BEGINNING 

UPON TUESDAY. Nov- 
ember 13th, 1666, Corporal 
George Deanes and three 
other soldiers set upon an old 
man in the clachan of Dairy and demanded 
the payment of his fines. On the old man's 
refusing to pay, they forced a large party of 
his neighbours to go with them and thresh 
hiscorn. The field was acertaindistanceout 
of the clachan, and four persons, disguised 
as countrymen, who had been out on the 
moors all night, met this mournful drove 
of slaves, compelled by the four soldiers 
to work for the ruin of their friend. How- 
ever, chilled to the bone by their night on 
the hills, and worn out by want of food, 
they proceeded to the village inn to re- 
fresh themselves. Suddenly some people 
rushed into the room where they were sit- 
ting, and told them that the soldiers were 
about to roast the old man, naked, on his 
own girdle. This was too much for them 
to stand, and they repaired immediately 
219 



THE Hlll,S OF HOME 

to the scene of this gross outrage, and at 
first merely requested that the captive 
should be released. On the refusal of the 
two soldiers who were in the front room, 
high words were given and taken on both 
sides, and the other two rushed forth from 
an adjoining chamber and made at the 
countrymen with drawn swords. One of 
the latter, J ohn M ' Lellan of Barskob, drew 
a pistol and shot the corporal in the body. 
The pieces of tobacco-pipe with which it 
was loaded, to the number of ten at least, 
entered him, and he was so much disturb- 
ed that he never appears to have recover- 
ed, for we find long afterwards a petition 
to the Privy Council requesting a pension 
for him. The other soldiers then laid down 
their arms, the old man was rescued, and 
the rebellion was commenced.* 

And now we must turn to Sir James 
Turner's memoirs of himself; for, strange 
to say, this extraordinary man was re- 

*Wodrow, vol. ii. p. 17. 

220 



THE BEGINNING 

markably fond of literary composition, 
and wrote, besides the amusing account of 
his own adventuresjust mentioned, a large 
number of essays and short biographies, 
and a work on war, entitled '' Pallas Ar- 
maia.'' The following are some of the 
shorter pieces: "Magick," "Friendship," 
"Imprisonment," "Anger," "Revenge," 
"Duells,"" Cruelty," "A Defence of some 
of the Ceremonies of the English Liturgie 
— to wit — Bowing at the Name of Jesus, 
The frequent repetition of the Lord's Pray- 
er and Good Lord deliver us, Of the Doxo- 
logie,OfSurplesses,Rotchets,Canonnicall 
Coats," etc. From what we know of his 
character we should expect "Anger" and 
"Cruelty" to be very full and instructive. 
But what earthly right he had to meddle 
with ecclesiastical subjects it is hard to 
see. 

Upon the 12th of the month he had 
received some information concerning 
Gray's proceedings, but as it was excess- 
221 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

ively indefinite in its character, he paid 
no attention to it. On the evening of the 
14th, Corporal Deanes was brought into 
Dumfries, who affirmed stoutly that he 
had been shot while refusing to sign the 
Covenant — a story rendered singularly 
unlikely by the after conduct of the rebels. 
Sir James instantly despatched orders to 
the cessed soldiers either to cometoDum- 
fries or meet him on the way to Dairy, 
and commanded the thirteen or fourteen 
men in the town with him to come at 
nine next morning to his lodging for sup- 
plies. 

On the morning of Thursday the rebels 
arrived at Dumfries with 50 horse and 
150 foot. Nielson of Corsack, and Gray, 
who commanded, with a considerable 
troop, entered the town, and surrounded 
Sir James Turner's lodging. Though it 
was between eight and nine o'clock, that 
worthy, being unwell, was still in bed, but 
rose at once and went to the window. 

222 



THE BEGINNING 

Nielson and some others cried, "You may 
have fair quarter." 

" I need no quarter," replied Sir James; 
"nor can I be a prisoner, seeing there is 
no war declared." On being told, however, 
that he must either be a prisoner or die, 
he came down, and went into the street 
in his night-shirt. Here Grayshowed him- 
self very desirous of killing him, but he 
was overruled by Corsack. However, he 
was taken away a prisoner. Captain Gray 
mounting him on his own horse, though, 
as Turner naively remarks, "there was 
good reason for it, for he mounted himself 
on a farre better one of mine." A large 
coffer containing his clothes and money, 
together with all his papers, were taken 
away by the rebels. They robbed Master 
Chalmers, the Episcopalian minister of 
Dumfries, of his horse, drank the King's 
health at the market cross, and then left 
Dumfries.* 

* Sir J. Turner's Memoirs^ pp. 148-50. 



Ill THE MARCH OF THE REBELS 



'Stay, passenger, take notice what thou reads, 
At Edinburgh lie our bodies, here our heads; 
Our right hand stood at Lanark, these we want, 
Because with them we signed the Covenant." 
Epitaph on a Tombstone at Hamilton.'* 



* A Cloud of Witnesses, p. 376. 



Ill THE MARCH OF THE REBELS 

ON FRIDAY THE 16TH, 
BailielrvineofDumfriescame 
to the Council at Edinburgh, 
and gave information concer- 
ning this ' ' horrid rebelHon. " I n the absence 
of Rothes, Sharpe presided — much to the 
wrathofsomemembers;andasheimagined 
his own safety endangered, his measures 
were most energetic. Dalzell was ordered 
away to the West, the guards round the city 
were doubled, officers and soldiers were 
forced to take the oath of allegiance, and 
all lodgers were commanded to give in 
their names. Sharpe, surrounded with all 
these guards and precautions, trembled — 
trembled as he trembled when the aveng- 
ers of blood drew him from his chariot 
on Magus Muir, — for he knew how he had 
sold his trust, how he had betrayed his 
charge, and he felt that against him must 
their chiefest hatred be directed, against 
him their direst thunderbolts be forged. 
But even in his fear the apostate Presbyt- 
227 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

erian was unrelenting', unpityingly harsh; 
he published in his manifesto no promise 
of pardon, no inducement to submission. 
Hesaid, " If you submit not you must die," 
but never added, " If you submit you may 
live!'* 

Meantime the insurgents proceeded on 
their way. At Carsphairn they were de- 
serted by Captain Gray, who, doubtless 
in a fit of oblivion, neglected to leave be- 
hind him the coffer containing Sir James's 
money. Whohe was is a mystery, unsolved 
by any historian; his papers were evid- 
ently forgeries — that, and his final flight, 
appears to indicate that he was an agent 
of the Royalists, for either the King or 
the Duke of York was heard to say, ' ' That, 
jf he might have his wish, he would have 
them all turn rebels and go to arms."t 

Upon the i8th day of the month they 
left Carsphairn and marched onwards. 

* Wodrow, pp. 19, 20. 
t A Hind Let Loose, p. 123. 

2^8 



MARCH OF THE REBELS 

Turner was always lodged by his capt- 
ors at a good inn, frequently at the best 
of which their halting-place could boast. 
Here many visits were paid to him by the 
ministers and officers of the insurgent 
force. In his description of these inter- 
views he displays a veinof satiric severity, 
admitting any kindness that was done to 
him withsomequalifying souvenirof form- 
er harshness, and gloating over any injury, 
mistake, or folly, which it was his chance 
to suffer or to hear. He appears, notwith- 
standing all this, to have been on pretty 
good terms with his cruel "phanaticks,"as 
the following extract sufficiently proves: 
"Most of the foot were lodged about 
the church or churchyard, and order given 
to ring bells next morning for a sermon to 
be preached by Mr Welch. Maxwell of 
Morith, and Major M'Cullough invited 
me to heare "that phanatick sermon" (for 
soe they merrilie called it). They said that 
preaching might prove an effectual meane 
229 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

to turne me, which they heartihe wished. I 
answered to them that I was under guards, 
and that if they intended to heare that ser- 
mon, it was probable I might Hkewise, for 
it was not Hke my guards wold goe to 
church and leave me alone at my lodgeings. 
Bot to what they said of my conversion, I 
said it wold be hard to turne a Turner. Bot 
because I foundethem in a merrie humour, 
I said, if I did notcome to heare Mr Welch 
preach, then they might fine me in fortie 
shillings Scots, which was double the su- 
ome of what I had exacted from the phan- 
atics."* 

This took place at Ochiltree, on the 2 2 nd 
day of the month. The following is re- 
counted by this personage with malicious 
glee, and certainly, if authentic, it is a sad 
proof of how chaff is mixed with wheat, 
and how ignorant.almost impious, persons 
were engaged in this movement; never- 
theless we give it, for we wish to present 

* Turner, p. 163. 

230 



MARCH OF THE REBELS 

with impartiality all the alleged facts to 
the reader : — 

"Towards the evening Mr Robinsone 
and Mr Crukshank gaue me a visite; I 
called for some ale purposelie to heare one 
of them blesse it. It fell Mr Robinsone to 
seeke the blessing, who said one of the 
most bombastick graces that ever I heard 
in my life. He summoned God Allmightie 
very imperiouslie to be their secondarie 
(for that was his language). 'And if,' said 
he, 'thou wilt not be our Secondarie, we 
will not fight for thee at all, for it is not 
our cause bot thy cause; and if thou wilt 
not fight for our cause and thy oune cause, 
then we are not obliged to fight for it. 
They say,' said he, 'that Dukes, Earles, 
and Lords are coming with the King's 
General against us, bot they shall be noth- 
ing bot a threshing to us." This grace 
did more fullie satisfie me of the folly and 
injustice of their cause, then the ale did 
quench my thirst."* 

231 * Turner, p. 198. 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

Frequently the rebels made a halt near 
some roadside alehouse, or in some con- 
venient park, where Colonel Wallace, who 
had now taken the command, would re- 
view the horse and foot, during which 
time Turner was sent either into the ale- 
house or round the shoulder of the hill, to 
prevent him from seeing the disorders 
which were likely to arise. He was, at last, 
on the 25th day of the month, between 
Douglas and Lanark, permitted to behold 
their evolutions. "I found their horse did 
consistof four hundreth andfortie,and the 
foot of five hundreth and upwards. . . . 
The horsemen were armed for most part 
with suord and pistoll, some onlie with 
suord. The foot with musket, pike, sith 
(scythe), forke, and suord; and some with 
suords great and long." He admired much 
the proficiency of their cavalry, and mar- 
velled how they had attained to it in so 
short a time.* 

♦Turner, p. 167. 

232 



MARCH OF THE REBELS 

At Douglas, which they had just left on 
the morning of thisgreat wapinshaw,they 
were charged — awful picture of depravity ! 
— with the theft of a silver spoon and a 
nightgown. Could it be expected that while 
the whole country swarmed with robbers 
of every description, such a rare opport- 
unity for plunder should be lost by rogues, 
that among a thousand men, even though 
fighting for religion, there should not be 
one Achan in the camp? At Lanark a 
declaration was drawn up and signed by 
the chief rebels. In it occurs the follow- 
ing: 

"The just sense whereof" — the suffer- 
ings of the country — "made us choose, 
rather to betake ourselves to the fields for 
self-defence, than to stay at home, bur- 
dened daily with the calamities of others, 
and tortured with the fears of our own 
approaching misery."* 

The whole body, too, swore the Coven- 

* Wodrow, p. 29. 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

ant, to which ceremony the epitaph at the 
head of this chapter seems to refer. 

A report that Dalzell was approaching 
drove them from Lanark to Bathgate, 
where, on the eveningof Monday the 26th, 
the wearied army stopped. But at twelve 
o'clock the cry, which served them for a 
trumpet, of "Horse! horse!" and "Mount 
the prisoner!" resounded through the 
night-shrouded town, and called the peas- 
ants from their well-earned rest to toil on- 
wards in their march. The wind howled 
fiercely over the moorland; a close, thick, 
wettingraindescended. Chilled to thebone, 
worn out with long fatigue, sinking to the 
knees in mire, onward they marched to de- 
struction. One by one the weary peasants 
fell off from their ranks to sleep, and die 
in the rain-soaked moor, or to seek some 
house by the wayside wherein to hide till 
daybreak. One by one at first, then in 
gradually increasing numbers, at every 
shelter that was seen, whole troops left the 

234 



MARCH OF THE REBELS 

waning squadrons, and rushed to hide 
themselves from the ferocity of the temp- 
est. To rip^ht and left nought could be de- 
scried but the broad expanse of the moor, 
and the figures of their fellow-rebels, seen 
dimly through the murky night, plodd- 
ing onwards through the sinking moss. 
Those who kept together — a miserable 
few — often halted to rest themselves, and 
to allow their lagging comrades to over- 
take them. Then onward they went again, 
still hoping for assistance, reinforcement, 
and supplies; onward again, through the 
wind, and the rain, and the darkness — 
onward to their defeat at Pentland, and 
their scaffold at Edinburgh. It was calcu- 
lated that they lost one half of their army 
on that disastrous night-march. 

Next night they reached the village of 
Colinton, four miles from Edinburgh, 

where they halted for the last time.* 

* Turner, Wodrow, and Church History by James 
Kirkton, an outed minister of the period. 



IV RULLION GREEN 



"They cut his hands ere he was dead, 
And after that struck off his head. 
His blood under the altar cries 
For vengeance on Christ's enemies." 
Epitaph on Tomb at Longcross of Clermont * 



* Cloud of Witfiesses, p. 389; Edin. 1765. 



IV RULLION GREEN 

LATE ON THE FOURTH 
night of November, exactly 
twenty-four days before Rull- 
ion Green , Richard and George 
Chaplain, merchants in Haddington, be- 
held four men, clad like West-country 
Whigamores, standing round some object 
on the ground. It was at the two-mile cross, 
andwithin that distance from their homes. 
At last, to their horror, they discovered 
that the recumbent figure was a livid 
corpse, swathed in a blood-stained wind- 
ing-sheet.* Many thought that this appari- 
tion was a portent of the deaths connected 
with the Pentland Rising. 

On themorningof Wednesday, the 28th 
of November 1 666, they left Colinton and 
marched to Rullion Green. There they 
arrived about sunset. The position was 
a strong one. On the summit of a bare, 
heathery spur of the Pentlands are two 
hillocks, and between them lies a narrow 

*Kirkton, p. 244. 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

band of flat marshy ground On the high- 
est of the two mounds — that nearest the 
Pentlands,andon the left handofthemain- 
body — was the greater part of the cavalry, 
under Major Learmont; on the other Bar- 
skob and the Galloway gentlemen; and in 
the centre Colonel Wallace and the weak, 
half-armed infantry. Their position was 
further strengthened by the depth of the 
valley below, and the deep chasm-like 
course of the Rullion Burn. 

The sun, going down behind the Pent- 
lands, cast golden lights and blue shadows 
on their snow-clad summits, slanted ob- 
liquely into the rich plain before them, 
bathing with rosy splendour the leafless, 
snow-sprinkled trees, and fading gradu- 
ally into shadow in the distance. To the 
south, too, they beheld a deep-shaded 
amphitheatre of heather and bracken; the 
course of the Esk, near Penicuik, winding 
about at the foot of its gorge; the broad, 
brown expanse of Maw Moss; and, fading 

240 



RULLION GREEN 

into blue indistinctness in the south, th e 
wild heath -clad Peeblesshire hills. In 
sooth, that scene was fair, and many a 
yearning glance was cast over that peace- 
ful evening scene from the spot where the 
rebels awaited their defeat; and when the 
fight was over, many a noble fellow lifted 
his head from the blood-stained heather 
to strive with darkening eyeballs to behold 
that landscape, over which, as over his life 
and his cause, the shadows of night and of 
gloom were falling and thickening. 

It was while waiting on this spot that 
the fear - inspiring cry was raised: "The 
enemy! Here come the enemy!" 

Unwilling to believe their own doom — 
for our insurgents still hoped for success 
in some negotiations for peace which had 
been carried on at Colinton — they called 
out, "They are some other of our own." 

"They are too blacke" {i.e. numerous), 
"fie! fie! for ground to draw up on," cried 
Wallace, fully realising the want of space 
241 Q 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

for his men, and proving that it was not 
till after this time that his forces were 
finally arranged."* 

First of all the battle was commenced 
by fifty Royalist horse sent obliquely 
across the hill to attack the left wing of the 
rebels. An equal number of Learmont's 
men met them, and, after a struggle, drove 
them back. The course of the Rullion Burn 
prevented almost all pursuit, andWallace, 
on perceiving it, dispatched a body of foot 
to occupy both the burn and some ruined 
sheep-walls on the farther side. 

Dalzell changed his position, and drew 
up his army at the foot of the hill, on the 
top of which were his foes. He then dis- 
patched a mingled body of infantry and 
cavalry to attack Wallace's outpost, but 
they also were driven back. A third charge 
produced a still more disastrous effect, for 
Dalzell had to check the pursuit of his men 
by a reinforcement. 

*Kirkton. 

242 



RULLION GREEN 

These repeated checks bred a panic in 
the Lieutenant- General's ranks, for sev- 
eral of his men flung down their arms. 
Urged by such fatal symptoms, and by the 
approaching night, he deployed his men, 
and closed in overwhelming numbers on 
the centre and rig^ht flank of the insurgent 
army. In the increasing twilight the burn- 
ing matches of the firelocks, shimmering 
on barrel, halbert, and cuirass, lent to the 
approaching army a picturesque effect, 
like a huge, many-armed giant breathing 
flame into the darkness. 

Placed on an overhanging hill, Welch 
and Semple cried aloud,"The God of Jac- 
ob! The God of Jacob!" and prayed with 
uplifted hands for victory."* 

But still the Royalist troops closed in. 

Captain John Paton was observed by 
Dalzell, who determined to capture him 
with his own hands. Accordingly he charg- 
ed forward, presenting his pistols. Paton 

* Turner. 
243 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

fired, but the balls hopped off Dalzell's 
buff coat and fell into his boot. With the 
superstition peculiar to his age, the Non- 
conformist concluded that his adversary 
was rendered bullet-proof by enchant- 
ment, and, pulling some small silver coins 
from his pocket, charged his pistol there- 
with. Dalzell, seeing this, and supposing, 
it is likely, that Paton wasputtingin larger 
balls, hid behind his servant, who was 
killed.* 

Meantimetheoutposts were forced, and 
the army of Wallace was enveloped in the 
embrace of a hideous boa-constrictor — 
tightening, closing, crushing every sem- 
blance of life from the victim enclosed in 
his toils. The flanking parties of horse 
were forced in upon the centre, and though 
as even Turner grants, they fought with 
desperation, a general flight was the re- 
sult. 

But when they fell there was none to 

* Kirkton. 

244 



RULLION GREEN 

sing their coronach or wail the death-wail 
over them. Those who sacrificed them- 
selves for the peace, the liberty, and the 
religion of their fellow-countrymen, lay 
bleaching in the field of death for long, and 
when at last they were buried by charity, 
the peasants dug up their bodies, dese- 
crated their graves, and cast them once 
more upon the open heath for the sorry 
value of their winding-sheets! 



A RECORD OF BLOOD 



RULI,ION GREEN 

INSCRIPTION ON STONE AT RULLION GREEN: 

Here 
and near to 
this Place lyes the 
Reuerend Mr John Crookshanks and Mr 
Andrew McCormock Ministersof the Gos- 
pel, and about Fifty other True Covenanted 
Presbyterians who were killed in this Place 
in their own Innocent Self Defence and 
Defence of the Covenanted Work of Re- 
formation by Thomas Dalzeel of Bins upon 
the 28 of November 1666. Rev. 12. 11. 
Erected Sept. 28, 1738. 

Back of Stone: 
A Cloud of Witnesses ly here, 
Who for Christ's Interest did appear, 
For to restore true Liberty, 
O'erturnfed then by tyrany. 
And by proud Prelats who did Rage 
Against the Lord's own heritage. 
They sacrificed were for the laws 
Of Christ their king, his noble cause. 
These heroes fought with great renown 
By falling got the Martyr's crown.* 



* Kirkton. 



Halt, passenger; take heed what thou dost see, 
This tomb doth show for what some men did die. 

Monumenty Greyfriars' Churchyard, Edinburgh, 
1661-1668.* 



* Theater of Mortality, p. 10. Edin. 17 13. 



V A RECORD OF BLOOD 

MASTER ANDREW 
Murray, an outed minister, 
residing in the Potterrow, 
on the morning after the 
defeat, heard the sounds of cheering and 
the march of many feet beneath his window. 
He gazed out.With colours flying,and with 
musicsounding,Dalzell,victorious,entered 
Edinburgh. But his banners were dyed in 
blood,and aband of prisoners were marched 
within his ranks. The old man knew it all. 
That martial and triumphant strain was 
the death-knell of his friends and of their 
cause, the rust-hued spots upon the flags 
were the tokens of their courage and their 
death, and the prisoners were the miser- 
able remnant spared from death in battle 
to die upon the scaffold. Poor old man! he 
had outlived all joy. Had he lived longer 
he would have seen increasing torment 
and increasing woe; he would have seen 
the clouds, then but gathering in mist, cast 
a more than midnight darkness over his 
251 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

native hills, and have fallen a victim to 
those bloody persecutions which, later, 
sent their red memorials to the sea by 
many a burn. By a merciful Providence all 
this was spared to him — he fell beneath 
the first blow; and ere four days had passed 
since Rullion Green, the aged minister of 
God was gathered to his fathers.* 

WhenSharpefirstheardoftherebellion, 
he applied to Sir Alexander Ramsay, the 
Provost, for soldiers to guard his house. 
Disliking their occupation, the soldiers 
gave him an ugly time of it. All the night 
through they kept up a continuous series 
of "alarms and incursions," "cries of 
'Stand!' 'Give fire!'" etc., which forced 
the prelate to flee to the Castle in the 
morning, hoping there to find the rest 
which was denied him at home.f Now, 
however, when all danger to himself was 
past, Sharpe came out in his true colours, 
and scantwasthe justicelikelyto be shown 

* Kirkton, p. 247. t Ibid. p. 254. 

252 



A RECORD OF BLOOD 

to the foes of Scottish Episcopacy when 
the Primate was by. The prisoners were 
lodged in Haddo's Hole, a partof St Giles' 
Cathedral, where, by the kindness of Bis- 
hop Wishart, to his credit be it spoken 
they were amply supplied with food.* 

Some people urged, in the Council, that 
the promise of quarter which had been 
given on the field of battle should protect 
the lives of the miserable men. Sir John 
Gilmoure, the greatest lawyer, gave no 
opinion — certainly a suggestive circum- 
stance — but Lord Lee declared that this 
would not interfere with their legal trial; 
"so to bloody executions they went."! To 
the number of thirty they were condemned 
and executed; while two of them, Hugh 
M'Kail, a young minister, and Nielson of 
Corsack, were tortured with the boots. 

The goods of those who perished were 
confiscated, and their bodies were dis- 
membered and distributed to different 

* Kirkton, p. 247. t Ibid. pp. 247, 248. 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

parts of the country; "the heads of Major 
M'Culloch and the two Gordons, it was 
resolved,"says Kirkton, "should be pitch- 
ed on the sfate of Kirkcudbright; the two 
Hamiltons and Strong's head should be 
affixed at Hamilton, and Captain Arnot's 
sett on the Watter Gate at Edinburgh. 
The armes of all the ten, because they 
hade with uplifted hands renewed the Cov- 
enant at Lanark, were sent to thepeopleof 
that town to expiate that crime, by placing 
these arms on the top of the prison."* A- 
mong these was John Neilson, the Laird 
of Corsack, who saved Turner's life at 
Dumfries; in return for which service Sir 
James attempted, though without success, 
to get the poor man reprieved. One of the 
condemned died of his wounds between 
the day of condemnation and the day of 
execution. "None of them," says Kirkton, 
"would save their life by taking the declar- 
ation & renouncing the Covenant, though 

* Kirkton, p. 248. 



A RECORD OF BLOOD 

it was offered to them. . . . But never men 
died in Scotland so much lamented by the 
people, not only spectators, but those in 
the country. When Knockbreck and his 
brotherwereturnedover,theyclaspedeach 
other in their arms, and so endured the 
pangs of death. When Humphrey Colqu- 
houn died, he spoke not like ane ordinary 
citizen, but like a heavenly minister, relat- 
inghis comfortable Christian experiences, 
and called for his Bible, and laid it on his 
wounded arm, and read John iii. 8, and 
spoke upon it to the admiration of all. But 
most of all, when Mr M'Kail died, there 
was such lamentation as was never known 
in Scotland before; not one dry cheek upon 
all the street, orinall the numberless wind- 
ows in the mercate place."* 

The following passage from this speech 
speaks for itself and its author: 

" Hereafter I will not talkwith flesh and 
blood, nor think on the world's consol- 

* Kirkton, p. 249. 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

ations. Farewell to all my friends, whose 
company hath been refreshful to me in my 
pilgrimage. I have done with the light of 
the sun and the moon; welcome eternal 
light, eternal life, everlasting love, ever- 
lasting praise, everlasting glory. Praise to 
Him that sits upon the throne, and to the 
Lamb for ever! Bless the Lord, O my soul, 
that hath pardoned all my iniquities in the 
blood of His Son, and healed all my dis- 
eases. Bless Him, O all ye His angels that 
excel in strength, ye ministers of His that 
do His pleasure. Bless the Lord, O my 
soul!"* 

After having ascended the gallows lad- 
der he again broke forth in the following 
words of touching eloquence: "And now 
I leave off to speak any more to creatures, 
and begin my intercourse with God, which 
shall never be broken off. Farewell father 
and mother, friends and relations! Fare- 
well the world and all delights! Farewell 

^Naphtali, p. 205 ; Glasgow, 1721. 

256 



A RECORD OF BLOOD 

meat and drink! Farewell sun, moon, and 
stars! — Welcome God and Father! Wel- 
come sweet Jesus Christ, the Mediator of 
the new covenant! Welcome blessed Spir- 
it of ofrace and God of all consolation! 
Welcome glory! Welcome eternal life! 
Welcome Death!"* 

At Glasgow, too, where some were ex- 
ecuted, they caused the soldiers to beat the 
drums and blow the trumpets on their 
closing ears. Hideous refinement of re- 
venge! Even the last words which drop 
from the lips of a dying man, words sure- 
ly the most sincere and the most unbiassed 
which mortal mouth can utter, even these 
were looked upon as poisoned and as poi- 
sonous. "Drown their last accents," was 
the cry, "lest they should lead the crowd 
to take their part, or at the least to mourn 
their doom!'t But, after all, perhaps it was 
more merciful than one would think — un- 
intentionally so, of course; perhaps the 

* Wodrow, p. 59. t Kirkton, p. 246. 

257 R 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

Storm of harsh and fiercely jubilant noises, 
the clanging of trumpets, the rattling of 
drums, and the hootings and jeerings of 
an unfeeling mob, which were the last 
they heard on earth, might, when the 
mortal fight was over, when the river of 
death was passed, add tenfold sweetness 
to the hymning of the angels, tenfold 
peacefulness to the shores which they had 
reached. 

Not content with the cruelty of these 
executions, some even of the peasantry, 
though these were confined to the shire 
of Mid- Lothian, pursued, captured, plund- 
ered, and murdered the miserable fugit- 
ives who fell in their way. One strange 
story have we of these times of blood and 
persecution: Kirkton the historian and 
popular tradition tell us alike of a flame 
which often would arise from the grave, 
in a moss near Carnwath, of some of those 
poor rebels: of how it crept along the 
ground; of how it covered the house of 

2S8 



A RECORD OF BLOOD 

their murderer; and of how it scared him 
with its lurid glare. 

Hear Daniel Defoe:* 

"If the poor people were by these in- 
supportable violences made desperate, 
and driven to all the extremities of a wild 
despair, who can justly reflect on them 
when they read in the word of God 'That 
oppression makes a wise man mad'? And 
therefore were there no other original of 
the insurrection known by the name of the 
Rising of Pentland, it was nothing but 
what the intolerable oppressions of those 
times might have justified to all the world, 
nature having dictated to all people a right 
of defence when illegally and arbitrarily 
attacked in a manner not justifiable either 
by laws of nature, the laws of God, or the 
laws of the country." 

Bear this remonstrance of Defoe's in 
mind, and though it is the fashion of the 
day to jeer and to mock, to execrate and 

* Defoe's History of the Church. 



THE HILLS OF HOME 

to contemn, the noble band of Covenant- 
ers — though the bitter laugh at their old- 
world religious views, the curl of the lip 
at their merits, and the chilling silence on 
their bravery and their determination, are 
but too rife through all society — be charit- 
able to what was evil and honest to what 
was good about the Pentland insurgents, 
who fought for life and liberty, for country 
and religion, on the 28th of November 
1 666, now just two hundred years ago. 

Edinburgh, 28/,^ iV«3z/. 1866. 



"From Covenanters with uplifted hands, 
From Remonstrators with associate bands, 
Good Lord, dehver us!" 
Royalist Rhyme, Kirkton, p. 127. 



